Pam and I spent yesterday being introduced to the most beautiful city we’ve ever seen, Savannah, Georgia.
I purchased two tickets for the Old Town Trolley Tours, the best $100 I’ve ever spent. We boarded around 10:30 or so. It’s advertised as a 90 minute tour but that’s only if you don’t get off and walk around, which you are free to do because there’s always another trolley waiting to pick you up. Honestly, we could have gotten off at each of the 16 stops on the tour because every one of them was fascinating and beautiful. Instead we only got off the trolley three or four times. Still, it took us almost five hours and we hardly scratched the surface.
We took a bunch of pictures but this was the sort of experience that photography doesn’t really capture. Savannah claims to be the first planned city in all of America, its dimensions laid out in 1734 by its founder, General James Oglethorpe, an Englishman who designed the place with a military man’s eye for detail and utility. The standout feature of the city layout were the 24 “squares” placed throughout the middle of the place, of which 22 survive to this day, un stained by “progress”. Each of them feature gigantic live oak trees strewn with Spanish moss, which create the strange sight of the downtown of a city overrun with 400 year old trees, statues and memorials, all of them a feast for the eyes, all of them shrouding the city in a rich towering canopy of shade and filtered sunlight. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.
Oglethorpe insisted on his new city abiding by his four “rules.” There was to be no slavery, no hard liquor, no lawyers, and no Catholics…no slavery because it was wicked, no hard liquor because it made people lazy, no lawyers because lawyering led to unfair persecution, and no Catholics because of the Spanish army down in Florida and Oglethorpe’s fear that if he allowed Catholics in his city and the Spanish were to attack, his Catholic citizens might side with the Spanish. Our guide pointed out the fact that Georgia has been trying to keep Floridians out ever since!
The primary reason that Savannah is so beautiful after nearly three hundred years of “progress” is due to the indefatigable efforts of six little old ladies who back in the mid 1700’s established the Savannah historical society—essentially the first and most robust home owners association ever formed in America. These hearty women and their predecessors have guarded downtown Savannah’s unique aesthetic with a tenacity that would have made General Oglethorpe proud. As a result, every where you look there is one gorgeous home/building after another. Perhaps the centerpiece of the place is the famous “Jones Street”, the beauty of which is overwhelming to the point of being where we get the expression “keeping up with the Jones’” from.
We stopped for some shopping and a delightful lunch at an Irish Pub. We took a gorgeous walk through Forsyth Park, where we staggered around with our mouths hanging open like a couple of spellbound tourists. We were consistently entertained by a series of Trolley drivers who educated us with history and hilarious stories told with top shelf humor mixed with a Georgia low country drawl.
So, if you ever find your self within a hundred miles of Savannah, Georgia, make the detour into town. Worth. Every. Penny.
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