The Georgia town has kept its bloody and beautiful history on the surface.
Savannah, Ga., is not the oldest city in America, but it sure wants you to think it is. The downtown has been painstakingly preserved and restored — by the government, the local art college, and individual property owners — to appear as though it never departed the colonial and Revolutionary eras. Take the littlest detail: the name of a corner bookstore.
The shop is at the corner of one of 22 historic squares that checker the downtown, once all of Savannah. Each square was planned by General James Oglethorpe, the British officer who founded Georgia on this bluff as a buffer between England’s colonies and Spanish Florida. Oglethorpe’s name is plastered everywhere in Savannah: streets, monuments, restaurants, clubs. His city squares served both as friendly gathering places and militia training grounds. They now house the statues of men who built and defended young Georgia — both for the British and against it.
Savannah’s historic homes are better described as manors. Nearly a dozen houses are now museums, and countless others have been converted to inns or rentals. Here is one, the Mercer-Williams House, through the town’s ubiquitous Spanish moss.
You can learn a great deal of hidden history on one of Savannah’s “ghost tours,” which literally walk you through the city’s many haunts. The left-hand room of the Mercer-Williams House, for example, was where owner Jim Williams shot a young man he was living with in 1981. It was also where Williams himself died of heart failure nine years later, months after his acquittal. Decades earlier and down the road, a vicious axe murder spree took place.
If you don’t care to trudge through the wet heat, companies offer tours on trolleys, converted hearses, and even horse-drawn carriages. Here is one passing by the city’s most famous cathedral on an especially spooky evening.
One house is purportedly haunted by its former occupant, the founder of the Girl Scouts. Others are haunted by casualties of the Revolutionary War, where an American siege to retake the city from the British resulted in bloody catastrophe. The buildings where limbs were amputated still stand.
More than anything from the tour, you learn that Savannah is built on an ocean of blood. First of the ancient Native burial mounds that were leveled by settlers. Then of those who perished in homes-turned-makeshift-hospitals during the Revolution. Then of the waves of Yellow Fever, thousands of sick and beaten slaves, and the starved Union prisoners of the Civil War.
This is the history throughout much of the American South. Savannah has simply kept it on the surface. Thanks go to William Tecumseh Sherman, who spared this town once he reached the sea rather than burning it like all the rest.
What it can’t display on the streets, Savannah keeps close underfoot. This 18th-century cemetery has many gravestones and cavernous crypts, but the ground is far more congested with bodies than it lets on. The original cemetery extends to where the brick-laid sidewalk is today. Sunken curves in the path betray where the unmarked graves are.
Nathanael Greene is put to rest here, by the way. You know, one of the guys who wanted to hire Alexander Hamilton? (He was actually very important to the war effort.)
Not all the history is bleak. Much is inspiring. Savannah proudly displays its Irish-immigrant roots with a smattering of classic pubs. The closer you get to the river, the older the bricks and cobblestone that you set foot on become. Bronze cannons gifted by President Washington himself still stand to defend the harbor.
Leopold’s famous ice cream was founded in 1919 by a Greek immigrant family with a major Hollywood obsession. The shop sits next to a classic theater and is chock-full of old movie memorabilia. The American film industry still runs through Savannah, as its historic exteriors and Georgia’s generous tax credits attract many stars onto these streets.
An old cotton exchange on the river was transformed into the oldest continuously operating Masonic lodge in the Western Hemisphere. The switch occurred after the boll weevil devastated Georgia’s signature crop.
I like Georgia’s new signature crop (peaches) better, anyway. Head down to Savannah’s weekly farmer’s market in Forsyth Park to pick up your own.
The oldest restaurant in Savannah, the Crystal Beer Parlor, also makes a mean peach cobbler. And, apparently, Spanky’s Pizza Galley & Saloon on the river invented the original chicken finger. (This is a very controversial subject, I have learned.)
Honestly, I have only captured a sliver of the living (and very much deceased) history Savannah has on offer. There are a whole lot of years in such a small city.
Like any beautiful woman, you hate to see Savannah go, but you love to watch it leave.
This is an installment in a cross-country road-trip adventure.