Just one of an untold number of beautiful old southern buildings in Savannah
A short post here for a short two-day stop in Savannah. For many years now I’ve heard of what a beautiful city Savannah was and I’ve wanted to see for myself. As we plotted out our Duluth to Key West road trip, we figured this would be the one new city that we’d go to just to see it, no friends to visit or anything.
It was totally worth it. People weren’t lying; Savannah is an incredibly beautiful city, evoking all the charming and iconic visions of the Old South. Of course the Old South wasn’t quite so charming for all the people who lived here; one is reminded that Savannah was Gen. Sherman’s goal in his “March to the Sea” across Georgia in 1864. To our good fortune, and presumably theirs, the city surrendered to the Union forces before they had the chance to destroy it.
What southern city would miss the chance to honor the traitors who tried to destroy our country so they could continue to own slaves?
Sadly I didn’t get to enjoy or discover the city as much as I would have liked. On our last day in Atlanta I somehow developed a truly nasty blister on one of my feet and really just couldn’t walk for a couple of days. Still, I somehow managed to limp around a bit to enjoy the grand old buildings, the live oak trees (the name “live oak” refers to oaks that are evergreens, keeping their leaves year-round) with hanging Spanish moss, and at least a couple of the 22 squares in the historic district that give the city so much of its charm.
One of those squares, Chippewa Square, deserves special mention. I was pretty excited to just stumble on Chippewa Square, since my family is Chippewa. What the heck is this park doing honoring my very northern Plains tribe? Turns out it wasn’t. Instead it was a misspelled park honoring the soldiers from the War of 1812 who fought in the Battle of Chippawa in Chippawa, Ontario, today a part of the Canadian city of Niagara Falls. Too bad. One other charming story about Chippewa Square: it’s the spot where Forrest Gump famously sat on a park bench. How cool is that?
Oh, and speaking of charm, I loved being in a restaurant and hearing people order beer to go. Seriously. Us northerners take so much pride in being so much more progressive than those damned southerners. Go ahead and try to order beer to go in any of the great progressive cities I’ve lived in up north. Hell, until just a few years ago there were no sidewalk restaurants in Cambridge because the city wouldn’t allow beer or wine to be served in sidewalk restaurants.
Two days wasn’t enough for Savannah, particularly given how lame I was during those two days, but that was all the time we gave ourselves. Now it was off on another whirlwind schlep through Florida down to Miami Beach, thought of by some of us as the Holy Land.
A statue of James Oglethorpe, founder of both the Georgia Colony and of Savannah, in Chippewa Square. He was also the designer of the set of squares around Savannah that give so much of the charm to the city. The statue is by Daniel Chester French, the same guy who designed the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial.
Parks and beautiful buildings
And one more
A big fountain