Savannah History: 12 Facts That Explain the City You're Walking
By Best of Savannah
Savannah history explains almost everything you notice walking the Historic District — why the squares repeat like a rhythm, why the whole downtown survived the Civil War intact, why a bronze girl waves at ships from the riverbank. The short answer: Savannah was founded in 1733 as America's first planned city, its grid of squares was designed before a single house rose, Sherman famously spared it and gifted it to Lincoln for Christmas, and its later fights — against demolition, for preservation — made it the city you can still walk today. Here are twelve facts that turn a pretty stroll into a legible one.
The Founding: A Planned City Before America Existed
1. Savannah began in February 1733, when General James Oglethorpe and about 120 colonists landed on a bluff above the Savannah River and founded both the city and Georgia itself — the thirteenth and final American colony, named for King George II. The bluff they climbed is the same one River Street's cobblestone ramps climb today.
2. It is America's first planned city. Oglethorpe did not let Savannah sprawl; he drew it — a repeating grid of wards, each built around a public square, with trust lots for civic buildings and tything lots for houses. Urban planners still study the scheme as one of history's most successful city designs, and you can feel why: the plan meters every walk with shade and open space, which is the entire secret of the district's charm.
3. Of 24 original squares, 22 survive. Oglethorpe himself laid out the first squares, and city leaders kept extending his pattern for over a century after he sailed home. Two were lost to twentieth-century development; the remaining 22 are the green rooms of the city — our squares guide walks the best of them, and once you know the ward system, you will never be lost downtown again.
4. The original colony banned slavery — then reversed itself. Georgia's trustees initially prohibited slavery in the colony; the ban collapsed within two decades, and Savannah grew into a major port of the slave economy, its cotton fortunes built on enslaved labor. That history is written across the city, and the sites that tell it honestly — from First African Baptist Church to the Owens-Thomas Slave Quarters — are covered in our Black history guide.
War, Fire, and the Christmas Gift
5. Savannah hosted one of the Revolution's bloodiest battles. The 1779 Siege of Savannah — a failed French-American attempt to retake the British-held city — cost hundreds of lives, among them soldiers of the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue, free Black volunteers from Haiti honored today by the monument in Franklin Square.
6. Sherman gave Savannah to Lincoln for Christmas. On December 22, 1864, at the end of his March to the Sea, General William Tecumseh Sherman telegraphed President Lincoln: "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton." Lincoln replied, "Many, many thanks for your Christmas gift." The march had burned a swath through Georgia — but Savannah surrendered and was spared the torch, which is a large part of why its antebellum architecture still stands for you to photograph.
7. What war spared, "progress" nearly took. By the 1950s, demolition was eating the old city — a market hall razed for a parking garage among the losses — until seven Savannah women founded the Historic Savannah Foundation in 1955 and began buying endangered buildings outright. The preservation movement they ignited saved the district that later became one of the largest National Historic Landmark districts in the country. Every intact block downtown is their monument; our historic homes guide tours the houses they saved.
The Characters: A Waving Girl and a Founder
8. A lighthouse keeper's sister waved at every ship for four decades. Florence Martus — the Waving Girl — greeted vessels entering and leaving the port with a cloth by day and a lantern by night from the 1880s into the 1930s, becoming world-famous among sailors. Her bronze statue in Morrell Park on the riverfront, sculpted by Felix de Weldon (the artist behind the Iwo Jima Memorial), still waves; the romantic legend says she watched for a sailor who never returned, and Savannah has never wanted the truth badly enough to stop telling it.
9. The Girl Scouts were founded here in 1912. Juliette Gordon Low gathered the first eighteen girls in March 1912, launching the Girl Scouts of the USA from her family's Savannah home — now a house museum and pilgrimage site covered in our Birthplace guide.
10. "Moon River" has Savannah roots. Johnny Mercer — the lyricist behind "Moon River" and a catalog of American standards — was born in Savannah, and the tidal river south of the city now carries the song's name. His bench-seated statue and grave at Bonaventure Cemetery draw songwriters the way the fountain draws photographers.
The Modern Legends
11. A single book rewired Savannah tourism. John Berendt's 1994 bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil — "The Book," locally — spent years on the bestseller lists, put Mercer House and Bonaventure's Bird Girl statue on the world's itinerary, and became the Clint Eastwood film covered in our film locations guide. The Bird Girl had to be moved from the cemetery to a museum to protect her from the pilgrimage.
12. The "most haunted city in America" title is a working industry. Between yellow fever epidemics, wars, fires, and 300 years of burials — some under streets that were later paved right over them — Savannah accumulated the raw material, and its ghost tour culture turned it into the city's signature evening entertainment. Believe or don't; the history underneath the stories is real either way, as our skeptics guide cheerfully argues.
Bottom Line: Why Savannah's History Matters to Your Trip
Savannah reads differently once you hold the plot: a 1733 planned city whose squares were designed before its houses, spared by Sherman's Christmas telegram, saved again by preservationists in the 1950s, and peopled by characters — a waving girl, a Girl Scout founder, a songwriter, a bestselling murder story — who each left something you can still stand in front of. Walk it with the story in mind: the squares as Oglethorpe's grid, the Black history sites as the labor behind the beauty, the riverfront statue still waving. The 3-day itinerary covers where to go; now you know why it's all still there.