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. A tything was a row of ten house lots, and the ten households in it shared guard and militia duty. The trust blocks were set aside for public buildings such as churches and the courthouse. The trust lot on the southeast side of Johnson Square is held by Christ Church, a congregation founded in 1733.

Every freeman who settled received 50 acres in three pieces: a house lot in town, 60 feet wide, a five-acre garden lot just outside it, and a 45-acre farm lot beyond. Each ward was tied to its own garden and farm tracts, so households that were neighbours in town were neighbours in the fields too. The first houses, overseen by Colonel William Bull of South Carolina, were plain clapboard cottages, 24 by 16 feet, with a loft and a small yard.

Oglethorpe laid out four wards at first and six in all, and the city kept adding wards to the town common in the same pattern until the 1850s. The New Georgia Encyclopedia counts 28 wards in the end, all but four with a square. Twenty-two squares survive, inside a National Historic Landmark District designated in 1966.