Savannah’s Amazing Grace (February 1989 | Volume: 40, Issue: 1)

Savannah’s Amazing Grace

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Authors: The Editors

Historic Era:

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February 1989 | Volume 40, Issue 1


I had planned to spend four days in Savannah last April and wondered if that might be too long. After all, the Historic District is only two and a half square miles (at that, one of the largest such districts in the nation). Surely I could walk it in a day. In the end the city’s attractions took up every bit of the four—and there was plenty left over for a future visit.

In Savannah, two and a half square miles means more than 250 years of history set along a working waterfront, a nearly mile-long alley of oaks, twenty-one shady squares, and a feast of museums, churches, and restored houses. The city’s colonial history began in 1733, when Gen. James Edward Oglethorpe—member of Parliament, philanthropist, and shrewd promoter—sailed up the Savannah River with a group of 114 English colonists to a site he’d previously secured by agreement with Tomo-chi-chi, chief of the Yamacraw Indians. When Oglethorpe set up a temporary home in a damask tent on the river bluffs on February 12, 1733, Savannah was born.

“I chose the situation for the town upon an high ground. . .… ,” Oglethorpe reported in a letter on February 20. “I pitched upon this place, not only for the pleasantness of the situation, but because … I thought it healthy. … An Indian nation who knew the nature of this country chose the same spot for its healthiness.”

Although Georgia’s founder made his reasons for selecting the site perfectly clear, to this day no one is certain from where he derived his distinctive plan for the town: a grid broken by twenty-four parklike squares (over the years four were destroyed, and later one was restored). Some say cities in China formed the inspiration; London’s West End is another candidate. Under Oglethorpe at least four of the planned squares were built; by the time of the Civil War, all were in place. “If four-and-twenty villages had resolved to hold a meeting, and had assembled at this place, each with its pump, its country church, its common and its avenue of trees, the result would have been a facsimile of Savannah,” wrote a visitor in 1859.

A newcomer to town might be torn, as I was, between the waterfront and the city stretching south of it. For a first glimpse, I chose to temporarily turn away from the river and walk along Bull Street, a broad thoroughfare with five greens strung along it. The first, Johnson Square, furnished with two splashing fountains, a regal canopy of oaks, and banks of azaleas in full bloom, became my instant favorite. In the middle of the square, named for Robert Johnson, Oglethorpe’s ally and the governor of South Carolina, is buried the Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. (It was at his nearby plantation in 1793 that Eli Whitney shaped the fortunes of the South with his invention of the cotton gin.)