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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

Related places

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.

More in Savannah

Others worth the drive in this corner of Georgia.

All of Savannah →
Skidaway Island State Park Forests

Skidaway Island State Park

Savannah, GA · Savannah

Six miles southeast of downtown Savannah, this 588-acre park sits right on Skidaway Narrows, where the Intracoastal Waterway threads past tidal creeks and spartina salt marsh. Its trails run through live-oak maritime forest out to boardwalks and an observation tower, and you can count on fiddler crabs scuttling the mudflats, egrets stalking the shallows, and deer slipping through the palmettos. Eighty-seven campsites plus cabins and yurts make it an easy basecamp for the Georgia coast.

Fort McAllister State Park Lakes & rivers

Fort McAllister State Park

Richmond Hill, GA · Savannah

The best-preserved earthwork fort the Confederacy left behind sits on a bluff where the Ogeechee River widens toward the sea, its grassy ramparts and Columbiad cannons shaded by live oaks dripping Spanish moss. Union ironclads shelled it seven times without breaking through; it finally fell in December 1864 when Sherman's infantry stormed the works in fifteen minutes and ended the March to the Sea. Today you walk the mounds and bombproofs, cast for redfish off the fishing pier, and camp among the marsh and oaks ten miles south of Savannah.

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.

Fort Pulaski National Monument Attractions

Fort Pulaski National Monument

Savannah, GA · Savannah

This pentagonal brick fort guards Cockspur Island where the Savannah River meets the sea, and its walls still carry the pockmarks of the 1862 Union bombardment that ended masonry fortification for good. New rifled cannon punched clean through seven and a half feet of brick in thirty hours, a result so decisive that engineers stopped building forts like this one. Walk the ramparts and the casemates, watch for painted buntings and alligators in the surrounding marsh, then climb the lighthouse-keeper views back toward Tybee.

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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.