100 Fun Facts About Savannah

Savannah holds which distinction among Georgia's cities?

Oldest city: founded in 1733, Savannah was Georgia's colonial capital and then its first state capital, a role it later gave up to Augusta.

Which Yamacraw chief let Oglethorpe's colonists settle at Savannah and later sailed to England to meet King George II?

Tomochichi gave the newcomers land on his bluff, and when he died in 1739 the colony buried him with military honours in the centre of one of Savannah's squares.

What was the name of the ship that carried Oglethorpe and the first colonists to Savannah?

The Anne took two months to cross with 114 colonists, who then waited up the coast while Oglethorpe went ahead and chose Yamacraw Bluff for their town.

Alongside slavery, which drink did Georgia's Trustees ban from their young colony at Oglethorpe's urging?

Rum was outlawed along with slavery, but neither ban lasted: the Trustees relaxed the rum law in 1742 and admitted slavery in 1751, both over Oglethorpe's objections.

How many of Savannah's original public squares survive in its Historic District?

22 squares remain of the 24 laid out by 1851. Three were lost to road works and parking in the 20th century, but Ellis Square was rebuilt in 2010 once its garage came down.

In the Oglethorpe Plan, what were the residential units of ten houses around each square called?

Tythings doubled as defence units: the ten households in each trained together as militia and shared guard duty under a tythingman.

Which Savannah square was the first to be laid out, in 1733, and remains the largest?

Johnson Square also holds Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene, who was reburied beneath his monument there in 1902 after more than a century in a nearby cemetery.

Forrest Gump's bus-stop bench scenes were filmed on the north side of which Savannah square?

Chippewa Square has no such bench to sit on: the film used fibreglass props, and one of them was given to the city and now sits in the Savannah History Museum.

Savannah's bronze statue of Oglethorpe stands sword in hand, facing which old threat to his colony?

Spanish Florida lay to the south, so the statue faces that way. Oglethorpe beat back Spain's invasion at Bloody Marsh in 1742, its last offensive against Georgia.

After capturing Savannah in 1864, General Sherman telegraphed Lincoln to offer him the city as what?

A Christmas present, his telegram said, along with about 25,000 bales of cotton. Savannah was spared a siege because its defenders slipped away and the mayor rode out to surrender it.

Forsyth Park's famous fountain, installed in 1858, was long said to copy the fountains of which Paris square?

Place de la Concorde was the model Savannah long claimed, but the fountain was ordered from a New York foundry's catalogue, and near-twins stand in Poughkeepsie and in Cusco, Peru.

Forsyth Park is named after John Forsyth, who held what office?

Governor of Georgia from 1827 to 1829, John Forsyth later backed Andrew Jackson in the nullification crisis, and Jackson rewarded him by making him secretary of state.

Which naturalist, nearly penniless on a long walk to the Gulf in 1867, camped among the graves of Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery?

John Muir slept there for nearly a week while he waited for money from home, reasoning that fear of ghosts would keep troublemakers out of a graveyard.

Which 1994 bestseller made Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery famous?

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 216 weeks and set off a tourist boom in Savannah, where locals simply call it 'the Book'.

Savannah antiques dealer Jim Williams stood trial four times for the 1981 shooting of whom?

Danny Hansford was shot in Williams's home in May 1981. Williams pleaded self-defence through four murder trials and was acquitted only after the last was moved out of Savannah.

Which director filmed the 1997 adaptation of Savannah's famous true-crime bestseller, with Kevin Spacey as Jim Williams?

Clint Eastwood shot it around Savannah's squares in 1997 and had two locals from the story, singer Emma Kelly and drag performer The Lady Chablis, play themselves.

The Bird Girl statue was moved out of Bonaventure Cemetery in 1997 and lent to which Savannah institution?

The Telfair took her in for safekeeping: after a photograph of her appeared on a bestselling book's cover, tourists overran the family plot where she had stood for decades.

The Monterey Square mansion restored by Jim Williams was built for which songwriter's great-grandfather?

Johnny Mercer's great-grandfather, General Hugh Mercer, began the house in 1860, but the Civil War halted the work and he sold it unfinished, so no Mercer ever lived there.

The Savannah-born lyricist of 'Moon River' co-founded which record label?

Capitol Records, set up in Hollywood in 1942 with a film producer and a record-shop owner, was a West Coast upstart that took on RCA Victor, Columbia and Decca before its sale to Britain's EMI in 1955.

As a boy, the future 'Moon River' lyricist worked at which Savannah institution, founded in 1919 a block from his home?

Leopold's Ice Cream was revived by a founder's son, Stratton Leopold, who left for Hollywood, produced films such as Mission: Impossible III and opened its Broughton Street parlour in 2004.

Juliette Gordon Low founded which organisation in Savannah on 12 March 1912?

The Girl Scouts began with a phone call to her cousin: 'I've got something for the girls of Savannah, and all America, and all the world, and we're going to start it tonight.' Eighteen girls signed up.

What was Juliette Gordon Low's lifelong nickname?

Her family also called her 'Crazy Daisy'; a mishap with a grain of rice at her wedding left her deaf in one ear.

The Savannah college founded in 1978 specialises in which field?

Art and design: SCAD opened in 1979 with 71 students in a converted armory, and it has since spread through more than sixty restored buildings around the city.

In the Savannah Bananas' Banana Ball, what happens when a fan in the stands cleanly catches a foul ball?

The batter is out, as long as the fan doesn't bobble it. Banana Ball also bans bunting and lets no inning start after two hours, all to keep the game fast.

Which team was introduced in 2020 as the Savannah Bananas' first rival in Banana Ball?

The Party Animals were created in 2020 so the Bananas would have a regular opponent. More rivals followed, and in 2026 six teams began touring as the Banana Ball Championship League.

Which barrier island town, 18 miles east of Savannah, was for decades officially called 'Savannah Beach'?

Tybee owes its resort trade to doctors: in the late 1800s they sent patients with asthma and allergies there for the salt air, and Savannah's holidaymakers followed.

In February 1958 the U.S. Air Force lost what in Wassaw Sound near Savannah?

An atomic bomb: a B-47 crew jettisoned it after a fighter struck their plane in mid-air, so they could land safely. It was never found, though the Air Force says its nuclear capsule had been removed.

Which weapon breached the brick fort on Cockspur Island near Savannah in 1862, making such forts obsolete?

Rifled cannon made brick forts obsolete: Robert E. Lee, who had helped build this one, judged its walls safe from guns a mile off, yet Union shells holed them in under two days.

Which Polish nobleman was mortally wounded leading cavalry in the 1779 Siege of Savannah?

Casimir Pulaski, often called the father of the American cavalry, was cut down by British grapeshot and died within two days. Whether he was buried at sea or ashore is still disputed.

The SS Savannah, which left its Georgia home port in May 1819, was the first steamship to do what?

Cross the Atlantic, in 29 days, though her engine ran for under 90 hours of the voyage and she made the trip without a single passenger or any cargo.

Savannah's Pirates' House tavern claims Captain Flint of which novel as a former guest?

Treasure Island has Captain Flint die at Savannah. The Pirates' House, which traces its start to a sailors' inn of about 1753, claims he spent his last days there and that his ghost haunts it.

How is Savannah's Florence Martus said to have greeted every ship from 1887 to 1931?

Waving a handkerchief by day and a lantern by night earned her the name the Waving Girl. Passing crews came to watch for her and saluted her in return.

What name is given to the lanes and crossings that link Savannah's Bay Street to the riverfront warehouses below?

Factors Walk is named for the factors, agents who sold cotton for its growers and used the crossings to get between their riverside premises and the city on the bluff.

The cable-stayed bridge carrying US 17 over the Savannah River is named for which Georgia governor?

Eugene Talmadge, a champion of segregation, won a fourth term in 1946 but died before taking office, setting off a crisis in which three men claimed to be Georgia's governor.

The Savannah River forms most of Georgia's border with which neighbouring state?

South Carolina faces Georgia across the river all the way to the sea. Its starting point, where the Tugaloo and Seneca rivers meet, now lies under the waters of Lake Hartwell, a reservoir.

The Wormsloe Historic Site is best known for a 1.5-mile avenue lined with which trees?

Live oaks, more than 400 of them, line the drive, but the avenue is younger than it looks: a descendant of the estate's founder planted it in the 1890s.

Savannah has marked which holiday with a parade since 1824, now one of the largest of its kind in America?

St. Patrick's Day starts early in Savannah: days before the parade, the grand marshal pours green dye into the Forsyth Park fountain, and the city's other fountains follow.

Savannah's Owens-Thomas House, designed by William Jay of Bath, is a landmark of which architectural style?

English Regency: William Jay drew the plans before he had left England. A 1990s restoration of its carriage house uncovered one of the South's best-preserved urban slave quarters.

Which Southern Gothic writer, born in Savannah in 1925, was filmed as a child with a backwards-walking chicken?

Flannery O'Connor called the newsreel the high point of her life and said everything since had been an anticlimax. The love of birds stuck: she later raised peacocks on her Georgia farm.

What are the floor holes in Savannah's First African Baptist Church said to be for?

Air for escapees hidden below: tradition holds that people fleeing slavery sheltered in a space under the sanctuary, which members of the congregation, many of them enslaved, built in the 1850s.

Which famous Methodist was minister of Savannah's Christ Church from 1736 to 1737?

John Wesley left under a cloud: he refused Communion to Sophia Hopkey, a woman he had courted who married another man, a warrant was issued against him, and he sailed home.

Savannah's Congregation Mickve Israel was organised in 1735 by Jewish immigrants who had sailed from where?

London was their refuge, not their home: most were Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had fled the Inquisition. They brought a deerskin Torah scroll that the congregation still keeps.

Bethesda Academy was founded south of Savannah in 1740 by George Whitefield as what?

An orphanage, which Whitefield named Bethesda, 'House of Mercy'. He paid for it with collections taken on the preaching tours through the colonies that stirred the Great Awakening.

Under which nickname has Savannah long promoted itself?

Hostess City of the South trades on Savannah's name for hospitality. An older nickname, the Forest City, came from the trees planted along its streets and squares.

Which inventor built his most famous machine in 1793 while a guest at Mulberry Grove plantation near Savannah?

Eli Whitney had come south for a tutoring job that fell through. Catharine Greene, a general's widow, took him in, and he built the cotton gin at her urging within months.

Which maker of private jets is based in Savannah?

Gulfstream began as the civilian arm of Grumman, the Long Island warplane maker, which split its business jets from its military work and moved them to a new plant in Savannah in 1967.

The huge mill built at Savannah in the 1930s, whose closure was announced in 2025, turned Georgia pine into what?

Paper: Union Bag came south in the 1930s for Georgia's cheap, fast-growing pine, and its mill became one of the biggest of its kind. International Paper, the later owner, announced its closure in 2025.

The Savannah River may take its name from 'Savano', a local name for a band of which people?

Shawnee migrants reached the river in the 1680s, and colonists wrote their name as Shawano, Savano or Savannah. A rival theory traces the name to 'savanna', the word for grassland.

The Haitian Monument in Franklin Square honours soldiers recruited from which French colony in 1779?

Saint-Domingue, today's Haiti, raised the volunteers from its men of colour. Henri Christophe, who went on to become King of Haiti, is said to have served among them at Savannah.

Georgia's Trustees required Savannah's first settlers to plant mulberry trees, hoping to export which commodity to England?

Silk never became the staple the Trustees hoped for: they hired Italian experts and put a silkworm on their seal, but cold spring snaps and a shortage of skilled hands held it back.

Savannah's airport is thought to have the only runway in America with what set into its surface?

Two marked graves of the Dotson family lie flush in the asphalt. The runway was extended across the family plot and the graves were left where they were, so the markers went into the surface.

The Spanish moss draping Savannah's squares is not a moss at all but a relative of which fruit?

Pineapple and Spanish moss both belong to the bromeliad family. The plant is misnamed twice over: it is neither a moss nor a lichen, and it is not native to Spain.

Savannah and Medford, Massachusetts both lay claim to which holiday song by organist James Pierpont?

Jingle Bells was copyrighted in 1857 as 'The One Horse Open Sleigh', by which time Pierpont had left New England to play the organ at Savannah's Unitarian church.

Savannah's Historic District lets adults drink alcohol on the street, as long as it is in what?

A plastic cup of up to 16 fluid ounces is the rule, one drink per person, and only inside the Historic District: everywhere else in Savannah, open containers stay banned.

Some of Savannah's riverfront cotton warehouses were built of stones that ships had carried as what?

Ballast stones also went into the bluff's great retaining wall, begun in 1854 by Irish stonemason Michael Cash, which runs for three-quarters of a mile and averages 19 feet high.

What wedding-day mishap in Savannah in 1886 cost Juliette Gordon Low the hearing in one ear?

A thrown grain of rice lodged in her left ear and caused an infection, and removing it punctured the eardrum. An earlier injury had already left her partly deaf.

Savannah's Hunter Army Airfield has a runway so long NASA made it a backup landing site for what?

The Space Shuttle could have used Hunter's 11,375-foot strip, the Army's longest runway east of the Mississippi, which lets a whole infantry division fly out from nearby Fort Stewart at short notice.

Savannah got its own Olympic Village during the 1996 Atlanta Games in order to host which sport?

Sailing needs open sea, and Atlanta is landlocked, so the races were run on Wassaw Sound off Savannah, a four-hour drive from the main Games.

Which future U.S. president married Savannah-born Ellen Axson at her grandparents' home in the city in 1885?

Woodrow Wilson was 28, with his first book just published, when he married Ellen, a trained artist who later kept a painting studio on the third floor of the White House.

Before the Bananas, Savannah's minor league baseball team was named after which biting coastal insect?

Sand gnat became the name in 1996, replacing the Cardinals. The Sand Gnats stayed until 2016, when the club moved to Columbia and turned into the Fireflies.

Which TV cook and cookbook author opened The Lady & Sons restaurant in downtown Savannah with her sons in 1996?

Paula Deen had spent five years running the restaurant of a Savannah Best Western before the move downtown, and a year later she self-published the first Lady & Sons cookbook.

Which Atlanta rap star was born in Savannah and spent the first half of his childhood there?

Big Boi, born Antwan Patton, moved to Atlanta and formed Outkast with André 3000 in 1992. In 2010 he went back to Savannah to launch a foundation for young people.

Which U.S. Supreme Court justice was born in 1948 in Pin Point, a community founded by freedmen near Savannah?

Clarence Thomas was born in his parents' wooden shack in Pin Point. After a fire in 1955 his mother took him to the single room she rented in a Savannah tenement.

Which disease struck Savannah in repeated epidemics, the severest of them in 1820 and 1854?

Yellow fever killed about 700 people in Savannah in 1820, including two local doctors who died caring for the sick.

Savannah porch ceilings are traditionally painted which colour, a custom once meant to keep 'haints', or ghosts, away?

Pale blue shades known as 'haint blue' were thought to ward ghosts away from a home. The ceiling of the slave quarters at Savannah's Owens-Thomas House was painted in it, and the pigment often came from indigo.

Since 1987 the once-copper dome of Savannah's Renaissance Revival City Hall has been covered in what?

Gold leaf was laid over the original copper cap of the limestone and granite building, which stands across the street from the United States Customhouse.

The fortified house Noble Jones built at Wormsloe near Savannah has walls of tabby, a concrete made from what?

Oyster shells were burned to make lime, then mixed with sand, water, ash and more broken shell. Limestone was not to be had locally, so early settlers made their lime this way instead.

Which poet wrote the inscription on the base of the African-American Monument on Savannah's River Street?

Maya Angelou's original wording made the city council hesitate, so in 2002 she added a more hopeful closing line, and the council then approved the inscription unanimously.

Since 1956 Savannah's Seiler family has owned every live mascot of the University of Georgia, of which breed?

Bulldog number one was a wedding gift that Sonny Seiler took along to the first home game of 1956. His successors, all named Uga, watch from an air-conditioned dog house.

A meeting between Sherman and 20 Savannah ministers in January 1865 led to coastal land being set aside for whom?

Freed Black families were to be settled on plots of up to 40 acres carved from 400,000 confiscated acres of coast, which is where the phrase 'forty acres and a mule' comes from.

Descendants of enslaved Africans on the coast and Sea Islands around Savannah are known by which name?

Gullah Geechee communities kept more of their African heritage than most, thanks to long isolation on the plantations, and speak a creole language rich in African loanwords.

Which future Confederate general, fresh from West Point, helped build the brick fort on Cockspur Island near Savannah?

Robert E. Lee was a second lieutenant just out of the academy when construction started in 1829 under Major Samuel Babcock, with the aim of protecting the port of Savannah.

James Oglethorpe first pictured his Savannah colony as a new start for which people released from English prisons?

Debtors gave Georgia its founding legend, yet few of them ever made the voyage: by the time the first ship sailed, the plan had shifted to sending the 'worthy poor' instead.

The 1924 hit song about a hard-hearted 'vamp of Savannah' gives its title character which rhyming first name?

Hannah is the cold-blooded heroine of a song published in New York in June 1924 and made popular by singer Margaret Young. Paul Whiteman's orchestra was among the first to record it.

Savannah was the first of five cities to hold which Georgia title, later held by Augusta, Louisville and Milledgeville?

State capital was a title Savannah had to share at first: the early legislature alternated between it and Augusta, meeting in makeshift quarters in both. Atlanta has held it since 1868.

The NS Savannah of 1959, named after the city's pioneering steamship, was the first merchant ship powered by what?

A nuclear reactor drove the ship, built to show off President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace programme. It sailed from 1962 to 1972, one of only four nuclear-powered cargo ships ever built.

Which Revolutionary War general died of sunstroke at Mulberry Grove and lies beneath a monument in a Savannah square?

Nathanael Greene had been given the plantation by a grateful Georgia for his southern campaign, and fell ill on the way home from Savannah in June 1786. His son was later laid beside him.

Which Gothic Revival mansion built in 1853 became General Sherman's headquarters when he occupied Savannah in 1864?

Green-Meldrim House was the home of wealthy cotton merchant Charles Green, grandfather of the writer Julien Green, and ranks among the South's most lavish Gothic Revival buildings.

Which ballpark, built in 1926 and rebuilt after a 1940 hurricane, is the home field of the Savannah Bananas?

Grayson Stadium began as Municipal Stadium and was renamed for the man who led the drive to raise the $150,000 needed to rebuild it. In 2020 the Bananas stripped out every advertisement.

Which Esquire columnist spent seven years in Savannah researching his 1994 bestseller about a local murder trial?

John Berendt meant to visit for three weeks at a time and fly home to New York to write, but moved to Savannah in 1985 instead. His book was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize.

Which Declaration signer, killed in a 1777 duel, is believed to lie in Savannah's Colonial Park Cemetery?

Button Gwinnett was obscure before he signed and died soon after, so only 51 examples of his signature are known. That makes it the prize for collectors chasing all 56 signers.

Which potent Savannah punch of whiskey, brandy and Champagne is said to have first been mixed in a horse bucket?

Chatham Artillery punch is named for a Savannah military company. It won national attention after Southern journalists at an 1870 convention were served it on a riverboat cruise.

The 'Washington Guns' displayed near Savannah's City Hall, a president's thank-you gift, were captured at which battle?

Yorktown is where the two bronze field pieces were taken in 1781. Washington sent them to the local militia company that had saluted his 1791 visit with 26 discharges of its guns.

The American Grand Prize, first run on a 25-mile course around Savannah in 1908, was a contest for what?

Automobiles built to European Grand Prix rules raced at Savannah, on a course the local automobile club laid out, and the event is counted as the first United States Grand Prix.

During World War II, Savannah's Southeastern Shipbuilding Corporation launched 88 of which mass-produced cargo vessels?

Liberty ships were what the yard was formed to build, and its first, the James Oglethorpe, was torpedoed and sunk in 1943. It added 18 smaller C1 cargo ships before closing at the end of the war.

The Weeping Time, an 1859 sale of some 436 enslaved people near Savannah, was held at what kind of venue?

A racecourse, Ten Broeck, hosted the two-day auction, and the people to be sold were kept in its stables beforehand. The proceeds went to pay the debts of absentee owner Pierce Butler.

Which river island facing downtown Savannah, linked to River Street by a free ferry, holds the city's convention centre?

Hutchinson Island was the Confederate escape route in December 1864: rather than surrender to Sherman, the garrison crossed it at night on a makeshift pontoon bridge.

Which Savannah church gained its spires in 1896, lost its interior to fire in 1898 and reopened the next year?

St. John the Baptist Cathedral, seat of the Catholic diocese, held the first mass in its rebuilt interior in December 1899. A project begun in 2024 set out to reinforce those spires.

Mrs. Wilkes' Dining Room, once a Savannah boardinghouse dining hall, is famous for serving its Southern lunches how?

Family-style at shared tables means guests go in ten at a time and pass the platters to strangers. Sema Wilkes ran the place for 59 years, and President Obama ate there in 2010.

Which Savannah square was buried under a parking garage in 1954 and only reclaimed as open space in 2010?

Ellis, one of the first four squares, lost its City Market building to the garage on a 50-year lease. When the lease ran out in 2004, the city chose to bring the square back.

Which Pulitzer-winning poet, raised in Savannah, lies in Bonaventure Cemetery under a gravestone shaped like a bench?

Conrad Aiken, who served as America's poet laureate, is said to have wanted the bench so that visitors would stop, sit down and enjoy a martini at his grave.

In 2023 Savannah renamed Calhoun Square for which woman, the first Black nurse to serve in the Civil War?

Susie King Taylor was born into slavery in coastal Georgia, opened schools for the formerly enslaved in and around Savannah, and became the first Black woman to self-publish her memoirs.

Which Savannah-born explorer, nicknamed The Pathfinder, became the first Republican nominee for president in 1856?

John C. Frémont lost that election to James Buchanan. His father, a French-speaking immigrant, taught French and dancing in Savannah while his mother took in boarders.

Which sculptor of the seated Lincoln in Washington also made Savannah's bronze monument to James Oglethorpe?

Daniel Chester French studied many portraits to show the founder as a military commander, while architect Henry Bacon designed the pedestal. The two teamed up again for the Lincoln Memorial.

Which trader, daughter of a Creek mother and an English father, was James Oglethorpe's interpreter in early Savannah?

Mary Musgrove already ran a thriving trading post when the colonists landed, and for a decade she helped Oglethorpe win treaties and land cessions as his mediator and adviser.

Which German-speaking Protestant refugees reached Savannah in 1734 and were given land upriver that became Ebenezer?

Salzburgers had been expelled from their Alpine homeland by its Catholic prince-archbishop in 1731. Their pastor hoped to build a religious utopia on the Georgia frontier.

Which New Orleans cornetist, mentor to Louis Armstrong, ended his days as a janitor at a Savannah recreation hall?

King Oliver was stranded in Savannah, where he pawned his trumpet and his finest suits and briefly ran a fruit stall. He died there in poverty in 1938, too broke to afford treatment.

Which French admiral led the allied assault at the 1779 Siege of Savannah and was twice wounded in it?

Comte d'Estaing arrived unusually early, with the hurricane season still a risk, and landed 4,000 French troops. The attack failed all the same, and the British kept Savannah.

Which architect of Montreal's Habitat 67 designed Savannah's Jepson Center for the Arts, completed in 2006?

Moshe Safdie first conceived Habitat 67 as his university thesis. His Savannah building gave the city's art museum a contemporary wing beside two National Historic Landmarks from the 1810s.

Savannah's state railroad museum, called America's most complete antebellum rail complex, was built by which railway?

Central of Georgia began the shops in 1853 with the carpenters' shop and added the roundhouse two years later. The turntable still operates, and one shop now houses a children's museum.