American towns don't come much nicer than SAVANNAH , seventeen miles
up the Savannah River from the ocean, on the border with South Carolina.
The appealing Historic District , ranged around Spanish-moss-swathed
squares, formed the core of the original city, and today boasts examples
of just about every architectural style of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, while the atmospheric cobbled waterfront on the Savannah
River , key to the postwar economy, is edged by towering old cotton
warehouses.
Savannah was founded in 1733 by James Oglethorpe as the first settlement
of the new British colony of Georgia. His intention was to establish a
haven for debtors, with no Catholics, lawyers or hard liquor, and above
all, no slaves. However, with the arrival of North Carolinan settlers in
the 1750s, the town became a major export center, at the end of
important railroad lines by which cotton was funneled from far away in
the South. Sherman arrived here in December 1864 at the end of his March
to the Sea; he offered the town to Abraham Lincoln as a Christmas gift,
but at Lincoln's urging left it intact and set to work apportioning land
to freed slaves. This was the first recognition of the need for ''reconstruction,''
though such concrete economic provision was rarely to occur again.
The plantations floundered after the Civil War; cotton prices slumped,
and Savannah went into decline. There was little industry beyond the
port, and as that fell into disuse and decay, so too did Savannah's
graceful townhouses and tree-lined boulevards. Not until the 1960s did
local citizens start to organize what has been, on the whole, the
successful restoration of their town recently, and tentatively, extended
to the predominantly Victorian District .
Savannah has acquired a new notoriety of late thanks to its starring
role in John Berendt's best-selling Midnight in the Garden of Good and
Evil ; For a sense of what goes on behind closed doors in the city, it's
an unbeatable read, and locals delight in making dark hints as to how
much they knew, or even did, themselves. If you want to look behind the
closed doors for yourself.
The Town
Savannah's Historic District is flanked by the river, Martin Luther King
Jr Boulevard in the west and, to the east, Broad Street, the old
commercial main street and offices. Broughton Street has since become
the main thoroughfare of downtown Savannah. You can get an overview at
the Savannah History Museum , behind the visitor center, in the restored
Railroad Station at 303 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd (daily 9am-5pm; $3),
where an informative jaunt through Native American culture, colonial
development, the river and the Civil War is let down slightly by a slide
show that is less a history lesson than a hard-sell promotion of
Savannah's considerable charms. A block south, the Historic Railroad
Shops (daily 9am-4pm) is a worthwhile slice of industrial architecture.
The best way to get a feel for the place is simply to wander the "tabby"
streets - made from a kind of primitive concrete mashed up with oyster
shells - lined with shuttered Federal, Regency and antebellum houses
adorned with intricate iron balconies, and intriguing details such as
false "earthquake decorations." These sturdy iron rods embedded in the
walls served no purpose, but were placed there simply to keep up with
elegant South Carolina neighbor Charleston in architectural cachet.
Note, too, the preponderance of light blue houses, washed in buttermilk
and indigo to keep the ghosts away. The shady residential squares ,
ablaze with dogwood trees, azaleas and magnolias, offer peaceful respite
from the blistering summer heat. Forrest Gump told his life story from a
bench in Chippewa Square , but eager movie-buffs will find an imposing
statue of James Oglethorpe, and no such bench.
Most visitors take in one or two of Savannah's old mansions , such as
the English architect William Jay's neoclassical Regency style
Owen-Thomas House , 124 Abercorn St (tours Mon noon-5pm, Tues-Sat
10am-5pm, Sun 2-5pm; $8; tel 912/233-9743), or the redbrick Georgian
Davenport House , 324 E State St (Mon-Fri 10am-4.30pm, Sat 1pm-4.30pm;
$4; tel 912/236-8097). The latter, the first restoration project of the
Historic Savannah Foundation, is sparsely furnished but boasts a
wonderful elliptical staircase and delicate plasterwork. The Green-Meldrim
House , on Madison Square (Tues & Thurs-Sat 10am-4pm; $5; tel
912/232-1251), is a splendid Gothic Revival mansion with dramatic
ironwork, which General Sherman used as his headquarters. At the
southern edge of the Historic District, the Massie Heritage
Interpretation Center , 207 E Gordon St (Mon-Fri 9am-4pm; $3), is a
simple, effective museum illuminating Savannah's architecture with
displays on its neighborhoods and growth, and tracing influences from as
far away as London and Beijing. While you can't go inside, the Mercer
House on picturesque Monterey Square nearby is one of the grandest of
the city's mansions and featured prominently in "The Book." Also worth a
visit is another of Jay's Regency mansions, the Telfair Museum of Art ,
124 Abercorn St (Mon noon-5pm, Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm; $8, Sundays
free; tel 912/232-1177), which also has the distinction of being the
oldest art museum in the South.
Though the Spanish moss of the city proper may be redolent of the Old
South, Savannah's waterfront area, at the foot of a steep little bluff
below Bay Street and reached by assorted stone staircases and
atmospheric alleyways, retains the look and feel of an eighteenth-century
European port. The main thoroughfare, River Street , is cobbled with the
ballast carried by long-vanished sailing ships, while its tall brick
cotton warehouses are said to be haunted by the ghosts of the slave
stevedores. It's now a lively commercial district, lined with seafood
restaurants and salty bars that heave with partying crowds on Saturday
nights; as certain businesses target themselves ever more directly
toward the "Spring Break" student crowd, however, some of its former
charm is being lost. Looking out over the water from the paved
Riverfront Plaza across the way you can appreciate just how busy the
port still is.
As the one-time point of entry for many of Georgia's slaves, Savannah
has a strong black history . The predominantly black Victorian District
, southeast of downtown, is being slowly restored, and has a couple of
good, if underfunded, museums. The nerve center of the restoration
process is the King-Tisdell Cottage , 514 E Huntingdon St, owned by a
middle-class black family c.1900 (Tues-Fri noon-4.30pm, Sat 1-4pm; $3;
tel 912/234-8000). In addition to a fine collection of gullah baskets
and African woodcarving, it illustrates the history of slaves and free
blacks before the Civil War, and of the freed slaves after,
commemorating Savannah's role as the site of Sherman's famous " Field
Order #15 ," which granted each freed slave forty acres and a mule. The
museum also operates excellent black heritage tours (leaving from the
visi-tor center, Mon-Sat 1pm & 3pm; $15; call a day in advance at
912/234-8000). The two-hour tours take in the Second African Baptist
Church , 123 Houston St, where Field Order #15 was signed; the poor
black Yamacraw neighborhood, now sadly run-down and depressed; and the
1777 First African Baptist Church , the oldest black church in North
America, built by slaves. This last, at 23 Montgomery St in the Historic
District, can also be visited independently (daily 10am-2pm). Note the
decorative carvings by the pews and diamond-shaped holes in the floor,
ventilation for slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. Back in the
Victorian District, the airy Beach Institute , 502 E Harris St (Tues-Sat
noon-5pm; $3.50), Georgia's first school for freed slaves, today houses
an African-American art gallery with a permanent display of
extraordinary woodcarvings by folk artist Ulysses Davis.
A ten-minute drive east from Savannah will take you to the lovely
Bonaventure Cemetery (dusk to dawn), swathed in trees and sloping down
to the Wilmington River. The final resting place of luminaries such as
Johnny Mercer and Conrad Aiken, it's also a major sight in "The Book"
and written about there to great effect. Sylvia Shaw Judson's Bird Girl
statue, which graces the cover and used to be situated here, has since
been moved to the Telfair Museum of Art.
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