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. Soon afterwards she had the interior remodeled as a meeting place for the troops, keeping the north wing as her own garage, and a vacant lot across the street became a tennis and basketball court. The first meeting was not held there.
According to the National Park Service landmark nomination, Low's cousin Nina Anderson Pape told her of girls who already went out with a local naturalist, W. J. Hoxie, and Low first met them informally in early March at her parents' Wayne-Gordon House on Oglethorpe Avenue. Within a year more than 60 girls had joined, and in 1913 Low opened a national office in Washington, D.C., and began calling them Girl Scouts.
When Low died in 1927 she left the building, all but the garage wing, to the Girl Scouts of Savannah. In 1928 the Andrew Low House and the garage wing were sold to the Colonial Dames. The Georgia Historical Society marker of 1966 on Macon Street called it the building used longest for Girl Scouting in the country. The council leased it out from 1986, took it back in 1996 and reopened it as a program center in 2003.
Getting there
32.0731, -81.0928
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