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. Her father took a photograph of her to John Walz, a German-born sculptor who had come to Savannah in 1886 with statues for the Telfair, and the statue Walz carved from it was finished in 1890. It is one of the very few funerary monuments in Georgia made in the exact likeness of the person buried beneath it. The grave became one of the most visited in the cemetery, and people left gifts there, especially at Christmas.
The tip of the statue's nose was lost at some point, and three explanations are told: a thrown stone, students rubbing it for good grades, and weathering. The nose was later rebuilt, and in 1999 a wrought iron fence was put around the grave.
Her parents later left Savannah and are buried in Vermont and New York. Walz carved more than seventy monuments in Bonaventure before he died in 1922, and he is buried there as well.
Getting there
32.0429, -81.0451
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