Thing is, they haven't moved.

The couple's brick home sits near the start of Washington Road, just up the hill from where Broad Street and John C. Calhoun Expressway spit out a roaring flow of traffic. When a visitor knocks on the front door, Mrs. Forrester, 80, has to shout to be heard.

When they moved there in 1948, the five lanes that are now out front were just two. They remember mostly scattered farm houses lying beyond the Augusta National.

"Just every once in a while you'd see a car go by," said Mr. Forrester, 83, a retired salesman.

Twenty-six miles and a world away, George LaVarnway, 61, uses a golf cart to get around his sprawling acres off unpaved Crawford Place Road, once part of the Crawford cotton plantation. Long empty ditches along the dirt drive used to be a cart path called Washington Road, which during the American Revolution passed a settlement nearby called Brownsborough.

No one knows for sure where the town stood, or what became of it. Now, a tranquil silence rules these parts, broken occasionally by a neighbor's radio, voices in conversation, a birdcall or the hum of Mr. LaVarnway's cart.

In the 50 miles between Augusta and Washington, locales along Washington Road's original route range from the famous to the forgotten. The farther a place lies from the Augusta National, the more likely it is to be the latter.

The Washington Road most people know is the kind of cluttered strip most medium- and large-sized communities have, a stop-and-go highway teeming with fast-food restaurants, gas stations, strip shopping centers, hotels, grocery stores and auto dealerships.

But far out of mind from the hustle of the Interstate 20 interchange, the Martinez business district and the speedway to Thurmond Lake, people still live the way the Forresters used to along a faded Washington Road, where cars and trucks rarely pass, or in some places might never pass again.

It could have been different. In 1780, a group of politicians wanted Brownsborough to be the seat of Richmond County, but the Georgia legislature deemed it too remote and "a very unsafe place."

Mr. LaVarnway doesn't mind the ruling.

Wilkes County historian J. Russell Slaton says the Wilkes County Courthouse is where the old Washington Road ended. JIM BLAYLOCK/STAFF

"This is our own little world out here," he said.

THE DIRECTION OF Washington Road has shifted over time as the region evolved and populations moved. It currently stretches about 25 miles from the end of Broad Street to the Little River Bridge over Thurmond Lake. Only four of those miles lie in Richmond County.

On a modern map, the road named for a destination almost seems like a misnomer, perhaps better titled Lincolnton Road, because Lincolnton is where it ends.

But long ago, it made more sense. A map drawn in 1910 shows a Washington Road meandering out of Augusta via the Delph, Winfield and Raysville communities.

Checks of other dated maps reveal that the outermost, mostly undeveloped stretch of the current road, which passes through Pollards Corner and the Leah community, actually follows the course of Old Petersburg Road. Petersburg Road did not go toward Washington.

Long before Gen. James Oglethorpe founded Augusta in 1736, Old Petersburg Road had been part of a Cherokee trade route, according to author and Augusta State University historian Ed Cashin Jr. Journeyers from Petersburg, a tobacco trading center up the Savannah River, later used it to reach Augusta by land.

When Washington was laid out in 1780, the farmers living there needed supplies such as coffee, sugar, needles and thimbles, and Augusta was the nearest place to get them.

J. Russell Slaton, of the Washington-Wilkes Historical Foundation, said Augusta Road, as Washingtonians called Washington Road on their end, left the town square in front of the courthouse, along what is now Court Street, and led to Augusta.

The journey both ways took a week, passing through parts of present-day McDuffie and Columbia counties, Mr. Slaton said. Horses forded streams where there were no bridges or ferries. Travelers trudged over dirt in boots and on hooves.

"Bear in mind, they didn't have wagons here in 1780," Mr. Slaton said.

Their trail likely joined Petersburg Road at the point where Old Washington Road breaks off from the modern highway, about five miles east of Pollards Corner. The mammoth roadbed there gives testament to centuries of wear and tear.

Reference to Washington Road appear in a deed book as early as 1799. From the birth of the United States to the era of the motor car, it traversed an agrarian landscape filled with plantations, homesteads and small settlements - places such as Bedford and Skinnersville near Augusta, Brownsborough near Appling and Bookersville near Washington.

In its heyday, the road past Kiokee Creek served plantations of wealth and plenty. Mule-driven graders kept the pathway smooth.

The road passed by the homes of some of the county's most influential figures. William Few, a signer of the U.S. Constitution; William Crawford, a congressman and secretary of war under President Madison; and Daniel Marshall, the founder of Kiokee Baptist Church, the oldest continuing Baptist church in Georgia, all made homes near Washington Road, said Charles Lord, the county's unofficial historian and a co-founder of the Grovetown museum.

"This was the cradle of the great minds of Columbia County," he said.

Near Washington, a ceremony in 1790 made the Rev. John Springer the first Presbyterian minister to be ordained in Georgia. A historical marker says the ordination happened under a giant poplar tree, which would have been located just off Augusta Road.

A white two-story house from that era still stands at the corner of Washington and Furys Ferry roads. The Warren house is said to be more than 200 years old, and one of the oldest in Richmond County.

Click on map for a larger image. STAN DODSON/STAFF

The Warren plantation encompassed property on both sides of the road, including what became Montclair subdivision and Warren Baptist Church.

Old Washington Road dead-ends after two miles. What's left of the original route has been broken up by roadwork and can no longer be traveled continuously by car. The state Department of Transportation found better tracks to pave as the 20th century unfolded.

How that happened isn't easy to sum up. Mr. Slaton, who has a section of the old Augusta Road running through his back yard near the Washington square, surmises it fell into disuse on the Wilkes County end with the arrival of the railroad in the mid-1850s.

As with country roads throughout the south, Washington Road's demise likely had a lot to do with the industrial revolution, which drained the countryside's already sparse population, Georgia DOT assistant engineer Larry Rogers said.

"Townships deteriorate, and the roads are no longer maintained," Mr. Rogers said. "A road is only as valuable as where it takes you to. It's just the history of our country when it comes to supply and demand and commerce."

Earl Morris, a retired inspector for the DOT, said politics played a big role when the state decided which roads to pave. A landowner with clout could steer development toward them, or away, he said.

The DOT also had to work around property owners who resisted giving up right-of-way, Mr. Morris said. In the 1960s, a junkyard proprietor whose building stood where the I-20 interchange would go refused to leave the building until workers touched it with a bulldozer, he said.

With a trained eye and a good map, history buffs can still find traces of the old road. Some sections exist as empty roadbeds jutting through woodlands and fields, or unnamed dirt driveways running along pastures and hunting grounds.

Other parts were absorbed. Tubman Road in Appling cuts through a large roadbed near the Old Kiokee Baptist Church, which was built in 1808 along Washington Road.

THE SURVIVING ROAD, the one the many converge on every year to find out which golf pro will earn a green jacket, has become a Main Street of sorts for Columbia County.

Augusta's wave of suburban sprawl has gone that way for some time, and isn't stopping anytime soon, said Jim West, the president of the Augusta Metro Chamber of Commerce.

It's Augusta's version of Savannah's Abercorn Expressway, Marietta's Cobb Parkway or Columbia's Two Notch Road. Every year its businesses feed millions in sales and property taxes to Richmond and Columbia counties, Mr. West said.

And like it or not, when tourists descend on Augusta in April, the bustling corridor is one of the first things they take in.

"Good or bad, that's the impression that we're giving, and I don't think Washington Road is that bad," Mr. West said. "It's congested. It's fully developed. There's a lot of signage that is not very pretty.

"But it is typical of suburban America, and I think it's what you see in so many other communities. There's one of these in every other city of any consequence."

Johnny Gray, 73, and his wife, Annell, 72, live on the sprawl's outermost fringe, almost nine miles from Washington Road's starting point in Augusta. The Wal-Mart Supercenter being built in the Evans Town Center is across the highway from their home, where they've lived since 1956 on property once owned by Mr. Gray's grandfather.

The couple said they believe in progress. They just never thought it would land in their front yard. They said construction trucks used their yard as a turnaround while installing a drainage curb.

Weekend warriors heading to the lake and Lincolnton residents coming to eat and shop in Augusta have kept the lanes busy for decades, they said.

Throughout the years the couple has lost three dogs to the highway. Raising their children and grandchildren, they'd set a play boundary far into the yard to keep bikes from rolling in front of cars.

They can only imagine what to expect this time next year. Making a turn out of their driveway has always been difficult. When they have to compete with Wal-Mart shoppers, they fear it could be impossible.

"It's Washington Road. It's a main thoroughfare. We're here, and it's coming," said Mrs. Gray, 72. "But it's going to force us to move."

In Augusta, the Forresters say they've learned to live with the growth. They say they've learned to handle the traffic and tune out the noise.

They raised their only child there, and selling has never crossed their minds, they say.

"This is home, even if it is Washington Road," Mrs. Forrester said.

Reach Johnny Edwards at (706) 823-3225 or johnny.edwards@augustachronicle.com.