Savannah, Georgia

Touring Savannah seemed a bit daunting to us at first when we stated looking at the long list of places to tour in that city. It is a town rich not only in history, but also in the arts. Composers and musicians lived here as well as famous authors. Many movies were filmed here, and Juliette Low started the Girl Scouts in this town. The best way to get an over-view of this town, it seemed to us, was to pay for a city tour. After doing that we then did a walking tour of the historical section of Savannah. My main goal in this posting is just to provide some history of the town via the historical buildings and monuments which we saw today. General James Oglethorpe and his settlers founded Savannah in 1733. On his statue it is noted that he was a "great soldier and philanthropist". Our tour guide informed us that Oglethorpe kept a peaceful colony by forbidding slavery(slavery did eventually come to the colony), and not allowing Catholics or lawyers to live within its boundaries. He felt lawyers created bickering and fights. And allowing Catholics in the colony would bring in the Spanish who were a hostile group living nearby in what is now Florida.  His statue is facing the south, because monuments of military figures usually are placed facing the direction of their enemies. Confederate soldier monuments  in Savannah are facing north.

Another interesting feature found on statues of military figures is that the legs of their horses usually indicate how that soldier died in battle. Brigadier General Casimir Pulaski's horse has is legs up because his rider died in the Battle of Savannah in 1778, in which the town fell to the British. If  Pulaski had lived, the horse's legs would have been down.

 In 1825 the Marquis de Lafayette visited Savannah and was quartered at the home pictured below. He spoke to the populace of the town from the southern balcony of that home.As you may remember, he greatly assisted America during the Revolutionary War.

 Another man important to Savannah's history is General Tecumseh Sherman. In 1864 he created a trail of destruction through Georgia, but stopped at Savannah because he had promised it as a Christmas gift to Lincoln. In Savannah is still the building where his headquarters were located, which we also saw during our walking tour of the town. The history in Savannah is phenomenal, this posting would even be much longer if I tried to cover it all.