Month: February 2024

It’s hard to know where to begin when talking about historic Savannah, with its 22 remaining leafy, residential squares, city park, colorful riverfront, thriving restaurant scene, burgeoning art school and downtown cemetery where Union troops passed the time changing dates on tombstones (significantly older than Bonaventure on the city’s edge). So, we might as well begin with the 19th century City Hall that stares down Bull Street that both separates the Easts and Wests of intersecting streets and threads together one row of city squares culminating at Forsyth Park.

the squares

Every square has at least one – and typically several – monument(s) and then a plaque (or plaques), to different people or events and none of them seem to match up with the name of the square, rendering conscientious sign readers both confused and exhausted, effectively curing them of the habit.

It was hard to keep all the squares straight and it was the buildings that began to be our key to navigation.

Forsyth park

Forsyth Park was filled with people enjoying themselves eating, drinking, buying things and playing Ultimate Frisbee. Now at the bottom of the pattern of squares, we headed back towards the Savannah River to visit some of the historic homes and institutions.

Taylor square

Crossing Taylor Square on our way to the Massie Heritage Center, we came across a performance by the McIntosh County Shouters, a well known Gullah family-based singing group, as part of the celebration of the renaming of Calhoun Square in honor of Susie King Taylor, a teacher and nurse who rose from slavery to play a prominent role in the Civil War around Savannah and in the Sea Islands and to write a memoir about it.

Monterey square

One of those landmarks that help guide your way through Savannah is, of course, the Mercer-Williams House on Monterey Square, one of the squares linked together by Bull Street. It was one of the first houses restored in the 1960s and gained some infamy as the site of the killing at issue in the four murder trials of then owner Jim Williams as recounted in “the book,” i.e. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It’s now a house museum owned and operated by Jim’s sister. It was the only house museum we visited that doesn’t allow photography (and wasn’t a non-profit), although the house was used in the filming of the movie starring Kevin Spacey (who bears a striking resemblance to our main character with the simple addition of a mustache). Bottom line: beautifully restored and furnished with absolutely top notch art and furniture (Williams was an art dealer, after all).

Lafayette square

Andrew Low House, Lafayette Square (1849). Photo Credit: Andrew Low House

Almost by definition, a house museum is going to be spectacular and, since Andrew Low II was a cotton merchant and reportedly the richest man in Savannah, his home (completed in 1849) was definitely not an exception. Touring it on what turned out to be the free-admission Museum Sunday in Savannah, we acquired a timed ticket and returned after seeing a few other, less popular, sites. It turns out that Andrew’s daughter-in-law was none other than Juliet Gordon Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts (who also lived here), married to his somewhat notorious son “Willy.” Perhaps we should just take William Makepeace Thackeray at his word (from 1856): “I write from the most comfortable quarters I have ever had in the United States . . . in the house of my friend, Andrew Low.”

An exception to that rule about house museums always being grand was just across the square at the childhood home of Flannery O’Connor; but writers aren’t expected to live amidst opulence and her father was a mere real estate agent. Dead of lupus by the age of 39 in 1964, this deeply religious Southern Gothic writer of frequently grotesque and disturbing stories had been “well-received,” but achieved fame with the posthumous publication of her Complete Stories. Visiting her childhood home felt to us like visiting the childhood homes of our own parents.

“[A]nything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor attended Mass daily. The truly beautiful Cathedral was on the other side of the Lafayette Square and easy to understand as a source of early inspiration as she later dealt with difficult Catholic themes in her fiction.

Monterey square (again)

42 English Jews sailed to Savannah in 1733 to participate in the fledgling colony’s experiment in religious tolerance and established the Congregation, the third in America.

When the emigrants were ready to leave in 1733, so the story goes, they asked for one of the Torahs to take with them to America and it was, as always, “Sure, you can take the old one.” It’s the oldest one in America, housed in the only neo-Gothic synagogue in America.

Madison square

Not particularly wealthy when he arrived in Savannah in 1833, Charles Green built his fortune as a cotton merchant and ship owner and then, as was the case with most of these houses, engaged a New York architect who completed this house in 1850. After inheriting the house, his son Edward sold it to Judge Peter Meldrim whose family sold it to the St. John’s Church next door in 1943 for use as a Rectory and to better assure its preservation.

Among the unusual features of the house is a rather complicated set of front doors where the outer front doors can fold back to create dual entry closets (pretty radical for the time) and two sets of inner front doors slide in or out to provide either glass or louvers, depending on the season.

The ornamental plasterwork was certainly the most extravagant we’ve ever seen. Interestingly, the church does actively use the building for its social functions, while seeming to be good stewards of the house that’s been entrusted to them.

Charles Green, as Mayor of Savannah, had ordered all of the Confederate troops and the police out of the city and issued orders that no one should display a firearm in the city as Sherman’s forces approached. He then invited the General to use his home as his headquarters during the Union occupation of the city. For this the residents considered him to be either a traitor or the hero who had saved Savannah from the fate met by Atlanta to the west. It was from this room that Sherman wrote to Lincoln, making him a Christmas gift of the city of Savannah and issued Field Order #15 granting freed slaves 40 acres of confiscated and abandoned land along the South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida coasts, along with an army mule to work it, an Order subsequently rescinded by President Johnson. (See also, posting on The Sea Islands)

Oglethorpe square

A Richard Richardson, ship owner and slave owner, built the house but soon suffered both financial and personal reversals, so that it was owned by the Bank of the United States which leased it as a boarding home in 1824 having among its guests the Marquis de Lafayette during his American tour in 1825 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Revolution. It was then bought by the Owens family in 1830 who ended up bequeathing it to the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1951. It’s been a house museum ever since.

The House

The Slave Quarters

along the Savannah river

Along River Street used to be a rough neighborhood, but now is a lot of fun. Lots of restaurants, shops and people.

Our driver Lyle, coming in from the airport after we dropped the car, told us we shouldn’t miss the Marriott’s repurposing of an old power plant along the river and the collection of geodes and other minerals they have on display. He was right. It’s amazing.

adieu, Savannah.
Sorry we couldn’t stay longer.

Reconstruction and the Gullah Geechee

A great mass of marshy islands hugs the coast of South Carolina and Georgia where we explored making our way between Charleston and Savannah. Here in the low country is where the Gullah Geechee live and where you’ll find the Reconstruction Era National Historical Park established by President Obama.

Early in the Civil War, Union forces recaptured the small coastal city of Beaufort (where much of Forrest Gump was filmed) and initiated the Port Royal Experiment nearby to gain experience in educating freed slaves to prepare for the coming transition from an economy and society based in slavery to one freed of the ownership and subjugation of humans. Education and the ownership of land were understood to be the keys to the success of future emancipation. The Penn Center was created as a school for freed slaves and founded by teachers from, among other places, Philadelphia (hence, the name). Early classes were held in the Brick Church. Even Harriet Tubman came down to help, although she apparently had some initial difficulty in understanding the dialect of the Gullah people in the area.

When the Union took the area, the white planters and other residents fled and left all of their enslaved people behind, abandoning their (other) property, providing the first opportunity for black people to purchase land in the area.

Indeed, after he took Savannah, General Sherman with the support of Lincoln issued Article 15 granting the freed people a significant swath of land along the coast (40 acres and a mule). However, upon Lincoln’s death, President Johnson rescinded this effort to create an economic foundation for the freed population.

Many years later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spent a lot of time at Penn Center strategizing with other leaders to better realize the promise of reconstruction following the long shadow of the Jim Crow era. Here is where he wrote his “I have a dream” speech.

Cypress Wetlands, Port Royal

The Sea Islands are also home to a lot of wildlife. We were stunned by the numbers of alligators and turtles who had hauled themselves out of the water to sun themselves on the day we visited Cypress Wetlands in Port Royal, after walking some of the trails on Hunting Island.

Lighthouses on the Coast (where else?)

Inside Hunting Island State Park we found a picnic table for lunch and a massive lighthouse. We were also really impressed by a beautiful visitor center nestled in the woods by a small pond.

If you’re going to visit only one lighthouse in your life, this is the one we’d recommend. It’s the Tybee Island lighthouse on Tybee Island just east of Savannah, Georgia; a monster at 144’. It has a keeper’s house and two assistant keeper’s houses and all the outbuildings and explanations you’d ever want, having been through quite a number of stages in its existence. But, yes, we crossed the state line and kept going to take advantage of having a car before surrendering it for an urban adventure in Savannah.

Fort Pulaski, Cockspur Island

Between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, 42 masonry forts were constructed to protect the American coastline. Fort Pulaski at the mouth of the Savannah River was one of those forts, built over 18 years between 1829 and 1847.

The fort was never assaulted by foreign troops, but was taken without a fight by Georgia Militiamen and handed over to the nascent Confederacy on January 3, 1861, more than three months prior to the shots fired at Fort Sumter.

In April 1862, one year after Sumter, the Union bombarded Fort Pulaski from Tybee Island for 30 hours, demonstrating with their rifled artillery that the days of the efficacy of masonry forts were over. The Rebels surrendered the fort and the Union further strengthened its blockade of Southern ports.

By all accounts, it was “the book” and Bird Girl that put the Bonaventure Cemetery and, indeed, Savannah on the tourist shortlist. The statue is now in a sort of protective custody in a museum because it had suffered from vandalism when still in the cemetery and the owners of the family plot wanted to reestablish some level of privacy for their burial plot.

”The book” is, of course, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the 1994 non-fiction novel dealing with the four murder trials of Jim Williams (highly successful art dealer and house restorer) and the colorful lives of the citizens of this good city. Bird Girl was on the cover and has become an icon of salacious creepiness.

About 15 miles from downtown Charleston, South Carolina, are two substantial properties that survived revolution, civil war, and the perils of human development. Both boast Charleston addresses (a search for the city on your favorite map app will unveil a strange looking creature indeed). Both tell a story of preservation of times well past.

Drayton Hall (1752)

Built by John Drayton on land acquired in 1738, Drayton Hall was the main house on a plantation growing rice and indigo using enslaved labor. As in every house museum we visited in both Charleston and Savannah, great pains were taken to tell the story of the people enslaved there and to speak the names of those people whose names survive in a written record. Indigo was a significant crop up until the Revolution when the market for it (as a dye) dried up as the British withdrew their patronage in a snit. The house apparently survived the wholesale burning and destruction of plantation houses by Union troops because the house was being used as a hospital and quarantine flags were set out by the Draytons.

The house fell into disrepair after the Civil War, as can be seen in the above photo. However, the family began to mine phosphate on the property, generating a lot of cash, some of which was used to replace the roof, windows, and one of the ceilings, as well as painting the interior the blue it remains today, rather than the original cream. That said, it is remarkably well preserved in its 1752 state up to the present, as one of the heirs in the line of succession in family ownership determined that the house should never be modernized and enforced that determination through her last will and testament. Consequently, the only accommodation to modernity beyond candle power is a small battery operated smoke detector in the slaves’ work area under the house. The property was acquired directly from the family in the 1970s by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Middleton Place (1730s)

John Williams established a presence here in the 1730s and began work on the houses to occupy the site. After his passing, his daughter Mary married Henry Middleton who completed the main residence and two flanker houses to, among other things, accommodate guests. Henry ended up with 20 plantations and around 800 enslaved people, although Middleton Place was not a working plantation, but a vanity project with extensive and extravagant gardens; his son Arthur was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the surrender of British forces in 1783 in the area was signed at Middleton. Arthur’s son Henry’s friendship with a French botanist brought the first camellia plants to America where 3 of the 4 original plants still survive at Middleton, known as the oldest surviving formal gardens in the United States.

After the house and both flankers were burned by Union troops, only the South Flanker could be salvaged. Today, it’s a house museum. In 1974 the family placed the property into a charitable Trust.

We started our exploration of historic Charleston at the City Market, a many blocks long brick arcade in the heart of the city, filled with sellers of soaps, hats, hot biscuits, and sweetgrass baskets and children’s duds sold by their makers, and quite busy even on a chilly, cloudy, February Sunday.

Wandering the city, we found the historic center to be a great place to walk and admire the colonial era architecture (especially all those long, side facing porches or “piazzas,” as they say in Charleston) and soak up the atmosphere.

The Nathaniel Russell House (1808)

The Nathaniel Russell House was the first of many house museums we visited during our short tour through some of coastal South Carolina and Georgia and, as you can see, its restored elegance and opulence was jaw dropping, especially the three-story, cantilevered, “flying staircase,” helping us to understand the lifestyle a slave economy created for those at the top. Russell was a prominent merchant and slave trader who had come down from Rhode Island before the Revolution.

The Joseph manigault house (1803)

Photo: thisismysouth.com

We arrived at the Manigault house in heavy rain and, so, have poached the photo above (duly credited). Manigault was a Huguenot who left France for the usual reasons and established himself as a rice planter with multiple plantations and hundreds of enslaved people inherited from his grandfather. Planters would have a grand house on the plantation as well as one in town. The enslaved people in town were predominantly women due to the type of work required. This was another beautifully restored house, true to the period, typically with original furnishings.

the aiken-rhett house (1820)

The Enslaved Quarters

The Aiken-Rhett House is a preserved, not restored, house, complete with slave quarters which, especially if visited on a rainy day, can be pretty melancholy. “Preserved” means agnostic as to time period and maintained in the same “as found” condition as when taken on by the Historic Charleston Foundation in 1995 after it had been acquired in 1975 by the Charleston Museum directly from the Aikens (who had owned it for 142 years). The Aikens were politicians, slave holders and industrialists; and much of the furnishings and even the painted and papered surfaces have been undisturbed since the 1850s in both the main house and the slave quarters.

The Main House

Among the glories of the house faithfully preserved by the Foundation is the paint in the main reception rooms applied by Wes Craven in 1982 while shooting the horror classic Swamp Thing. Take a close look at the wallpaper to the right of the bust, above. You can see the pins holding small sheets of plastic intended to protect the 19th century wallpaper from further decay. A few more hurricanes and there may be less to see.

The Battery

Being granted a sunny day, we walked the Battery neighborhood, along the more southerly stretch of river with a view out to the harbor and Castle Pinckney, where lots of workmen were out repairing and painting the stupendous mansions.

Fort Sumter

Thanks to a break in the windy, stormy weather, the Park Service resumed boat service to Fort Sumter and we were able to make the 11:00 ferry, learning on the way that the “Fort Sumter” we spotted from the Battery was actually Castle Pinckney. It seems that the fort is rather low to the water because it was largely destroyed by the Union when they attempted to take it back from Rebel forces in 1863. The Confederates, of course, fired the first shots of the war from Fort Moultrie in April 1861 and gained the fort due to the Union’s hopeless position. More modern weaponry had made brick forts pretty much obsolete since the fort’s construction after the War of 1812 on a sandbar transformed into a manmade island. Just above the “l” in “Projectile Embedded” you can see what smacked into the back of the fortification from the Federal bombardment. As those lyrics by Francis Scott Key remind us, it’s not only what comes at you from the front that can be deadly (like the shrapnel from those “Bombs bursting in air”).

Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon (1771)

The British finished their Customs House just before the Revolution, so the cellar intended for secure storage housed prisoners of war instead. The building has long been owned and operated by the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) who maintain a small museum and run tours of the dungeon. It’s also one of only four buildings still standing where the Declaration of Independence was ratified.

The City of Charleston commissioned John Trumbull to paint a portrait of George Washington to commemorate his visit to the city. He presented the painting on the left, depicting a heroic Washington at the Battle of Trenton. This was rejected by the city because they wanted a depiction of Washington in their city. Trumbull complied, although wags have often wondered if there is a message from Trumbull somewhere in the painting. [For those who can’t quite grasp, and really need to ask: please see the hint below.*]

So, farewell, Charleston. It was a lovely visit to the “Holy City,” a place with too many churches to count.

*The insult is not: “You’re such a horse’s head!”