Local Stories in Georgia
14 places·1 county
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Featured places available on the Whistlestop audio tour guide app
This is a sample of locations. There are many more audio stories on the app.
Film History·Chatham County
Captain Flint's Savannah
Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, published in 1883, mentions Savannah three times, and each time it is where Captain Flint died. Billy Bones says Flint gave him the map at Savannah when he lay dying, Long John Silver says Flint died of rum at Savannah, and Jim Hawkins remembers the blue-faced buccaneer who died at Savannah singing and shouting for drink. The novel names no inn, no street and no house.
History·Chatham County
First Girl Scout HQ
The stucco building at 330 Drayton Street, behind the Andrew Low House garden, was built as the Lows' carriage house and servants' quarters, probably in 1849, and in 1912 Juliette Gordon Low gave it over to the girls who became the first Girl Scouts in the United States. Low organized the first American Girl Guide troop in Savannah in March 1912 with eighteen girls, and 12 March is the date the movement keeps as its founding.
History·Chatham County
Jim Williams on Trial
Jim Williams, an antiques dealer and one of Savannah's leading private restorationists, shot his 21-year-old assistant Danny Hansford at Mercer House on Monterey Square in the early hours of 2 May 1981, and called police just before 3 a.m. Williams said Hansford had fired a pistol at him first. Prosecutors said he had staged the scene.
History·Chatham County
Little Gracie Watson
The life-size marble statue of Gracie Watson in Bonaventure Cemetery, at Section E, lot 98, marks the grave of a six-year-old who died on 22 April 1889. Gracie was the only child of W. J. and Frances Watson, who ran the Pulaski House hotel on Johnson Square, where she grew up. A newspaper of the time gave the cause as blood poisoning brought on by a severe attack of pneumonia.
History·Chatham County
Ten Broeck Race Course
The Ten Broeck Race Course, on the west side of Savannah two and a half to three miles from the old city, was the scene of the Weeping Time: on 2 and 3 March 1859, 436 enslaved men, women and children from Pierce Mease Butler's plantations near Darien were put up for sale there to pay his debts, and 429 were sold. They were kept in the course's horse stalls before the auction, and the sale was held at the grandstand.
History·Chatham County
Ten Houses to a Tything
Johnson Square, laid out in 1733, was the first of Savannah's squares and the centre of its first ward, the unit that James Edward Oglethorpe's town plan was built from. Each ward was arranged around one open square. Four tything blocks lay on its north and south sides and four smaller trust blocks on its east and west. The streets bounding a ward run straight through, while the streets inside it stop at the square.
History·Chatham County
The Box in the Monument
The marble Pulaski Monument in Monterey Square, about 55 feet tall, stands over a grave whose occupant has been argued about since 1779. Casimir Pulaski, the Polish cavalry commander fighting for the American cause, was hit by grapeshot during a cavalry charge in the failed Franco-American assault on Savannah on 9 October 1779 and died two days later. One account has him dying aboard the brig Wasp and buried at sea.
History·Chatham County
The Brick Church
First African Baptist Church on Montgomery Street, facing Franklin Square, was finished in 1859 at a cost of $26,000 by a congregation made up largely of enslaved people, and Savannah long called it the brick church. E. K. Love, its pastor, wrote in the church's 1888 history that it was the only brick building owned by Black people in the city or the state. The Georgia Historical Society marker in Franklin Square says congregants, free and enslaved, built it of Savannah Grey brick.
Military·Chatham County
The Chasseurs of 1779
The bronze group in Franklin Square honours the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue, a regiment of men of colour from the French colony that became Haiti, and the largest unit of soldiers of African descent to fight in the American Revolution. The regiment was raised on 12 March 1779 under the Marquis de Rouvray, open to free men of colour and to enslaved men who were promised freedom on their return. Each company was to have 100 men under three white officers.
Military·Chatham County
The Immortal 600 Graves
Thirteen Confederate officers lie in individually unmarked graves, now named together on one marker, in the small cemetery at the northwest corner of Fort Pulaski on Cockspur Island. They were among the prisoners known in the South as the Immortal Six Hundred, held at the fort from October 1864 to March 1865.
History·Chatham County
The Lost Elbert Square
Elbert Square was laid out in 1801, during Savannah's westward expansion, on the western edge of the city and named for Samuel Elbert, a Revolutionary War soldier, sheriff of Chatham County and governor of Georgia. Its ward and Liberty Ward, laid out in 1799, were narrower than the standard ward, fitted into the strip of land left on the western margin of the town common. In the 1930s Montgomery Street was straightened to carry U.S.
History·Chatham County
The Savannah Colloquy
At 8 p.m. on Thursday, 12 January 1865, General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton met twenty Black ministers and church officers at Sherman's headquarters in the Green-Meldrim House on Madison Square. Sherman's army had taken Savannah on 21 December 1864, followed by thousands of people who had left the plantations along its march.
Industry & Science·Chatham County
The Varn Oyster Factory
The A.S. Varn & Son oyster and crab factory on the Moon River was the biggest employer in Pin Point, the Gullah Geechee community settled in 1896 by formerly enslaved people from Ossabaw, Green and Skidaway Islands. A.S. Varn Sr. opened it in 1926, and when a hurricane wrecked the site in 1929 he rebuilt the plant. Men of the community brought in oysters in winter and live crabs in summer in wooden bateaux, and women picked crab at the factory.
Military·Chatham County
WWII Rescue Boat Station
The Thunderbolt Yacht Basin, at 3124 River Drive on the bluff of the Wilmington River, opened in 1939 for the yacht racing then popular around Savannah, and in 1942 the Army Air Forces at Hunter Field took it over as a rescue boat station. It was home to the boats of Operations Platoon No. 9 of the 922nd Quartermaster Company Boat, Aviation, which stood by for aircrews whose planes came down in the water during over-water bombing and gunnery training.