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Savannah Historic District

Photo: Jud McCranie (Bubba73) / CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

🎡 Attractions

Savannah Historic District

Savannah, GA · Savannah

About

Laid out by James Oglethorpe in 1733, this is the original walking city: 22 leafy public squares strung through a grid of cast-iron balconies, moss-draped live oaks, and antebellum townhouses, now one of the largest National Historic Landmark districts in the country. The squares pull you from one to the next on foot, ending at Forsyth Park where a white 1858 fountain anchors thirty acres of shade. Time it for late afternoon, when the Spanish moss goes gold and the brick sidewalks empty out.

Highlights

Getting there

301 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Savannah, GA 31401

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Mercer-Williams House Museum Attractions

Mercer-Williams House Museum

Savannah, GA · Savannah

The red-brick Italianate mansion on Monterey Square was designed in 1860 by architect John S. Norris for General Hugh Mercer, great-grandfather of songwriter Johnny Mercer, and rescued from ruin a century later by antiques dealer Jim Williams. It is the house at the center of the 1981 killing chronicled in John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Guided tours move through the foyer, Williams's study and the dining room, where his collection of 18th and 19th century furniture and Savannah portraiture still fills the rooms.

Bonaventure Cemetery Attractions

Bonaventure Cemetery

Savannah, GA · Savannah

Live oaks draped in Spanish moss arch over more than a hundred acres on a bluff above the Wilmington River, shading a Victorian gallery of marble angels and weathered family plots that has drawn visitors since the 1840s. Toys, coins, and flowers still pile against the iron fence around Little Gracie Watson, the six-year-old whose 1889 statue is the most-visited grave here. The grounds gained wider fame through Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but the quiet and the canopy are the real reason to walk it slowly.

SCAD Museum of Art Attractions

SCAD Museum of Art

Savannah, GA · Savannah

Set inside the 1856 Gray Building, the only surviving antebellum railroad complex in the country, this museum wraps a Greek Revival shell around galleries that pivot from haute couture to contemporary installation. An 86-foot steel-and-glass lantern rises from the historic brick, redrawing the Savannah skyline and pulling daylight down into the permanent collection of more than 4,500 works. Rotating shows from the SCAD program keep the walls changing, so a second visit rarely repeats the first.

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Curated guides that feature Savannah Historic District.

Georgia Attractions45 places

Georgia Attractions

The Georgia stops worth building a day around. Atlanta's Coca-Cola vault and a whale shark the size of a school bus, the oak-shaded squares of Savannah, a visionary's painted folk-art compound in Buena Vista, FDR's Little White House, and a 56-foot sheet-metal chicken in Marietta. The famous, the historic, and the gloriously strange.