All research and commentary by Jefferson Hall
In 1895 the City purchased control over an old used cemetery, once filled to the brim with bodies, now largely abandoned
In 1895, following years of complaints and legal battles, an iconic (yet foreboding) tract of land in the middle of town would be laid to rest. Three sides of its imposing brick wall would come down, the grounds would be landscaped, trees planted and paths graded. With the $6500 purchase of the old South Broad Street Cemetery in November of 1895 (just seventeen months before “South Broad Street” itself would be renamed “Oglethorpe Avenue”), the City ended a century of bitter contention over ownership of the property and introduced a new and novel idea… a park created out of an abandoned cemetery. If there was ever a moment when the old South Broad Street Cemetery became Colonial Park, this was it.
By 1897 the Savannah Morning News was hailing the city’s move for changing “the old South Broad street cemetery from a nuisance, and an eye-sore, a blot upon our fair city—into a quaint, attractive little park with broad cemented walks bordered with luxuriant grass and fresh green shrubbery relieved with glowing bits of flower color, making it now a place as interesting to our visitors and pleasing to our women and children, as it was before noxious and disgusting to the one and forbidding to the others.” (June 24, 1897)
In walking the tabby sidewalks of the Colonial Park Cemetery today it should be understood that what we see today is ultimately less a creation of the Colonial era than of 1896… today’s Colonial Park Cemetery is a Victorian-era memorial park—in essence, a cleaned up, sanitized, hollowed-out and somewhat vacated version of what had once been known as the South Broad Street Cemetery. It began existence as a very modest parish cemetery belonging to a still officially-unrecognized Anglican congregation distantly located on Johnson Square… but no headstones from this earliest period survive. It was referred to as “old” even in the 1820s, by which time it was already closed to the general public. And for its first 50 years the cemetery was outside of town; the 18th century town lay entirely to the north of it… it was only after 1800 that the wards began spreading around the cemetery, awkwardly trapping it in the middle of Common—obstructing streets, forbidding buildings, depressing property values and sparking conflict between its two very unhappy owners.
Another fact little recognized today is that while this cemetery today stands alone, by 1845 it was only one of no fewer than five large and active cemeteries downtown between today’s Oglethorpe Avenue and Huntingdon Street.
Stones & family vaults…
The oldest headstone still standing today is a low slate stone for William Bower Williamson, who died in February, 1762. To put this date in perspective, this was shortly after the arrival of James Wright, Colonial Georgia’s third royal governor…
The last official interment was eight-year old William Francois Joseph Thomasson, who died on April 19, 1861. To put this date in perspective, this was one week after the opening shots of the Civil War…
The cemetery was closed against burials effective July 1, 1853, though as seen with Thomasson, some vaults did continue to receive family members in those years immediately following. When, exactly, the old cemetery was begun is unclear; the earliest surviving record referring to the site was a 1763 Committee recommendation urging its enlargement due to the fact that it was already full. Interestingly, today there are no markers dating from the 1750s within this original 1750s tract.
To the right are three images; the upper left is a depiction of the earliest tract of the cemetery, upper right an aerial Google view of the site today. The lower image to the right was taken from the north end of the tract facing south; for a plot that was considered so full by 1763 that it required an addition it would appear today sparsely populated. The William Bower headstone is the only marker in the cemetery predating 1763… the clear takeaway is that many of the 18th century markers do not survive, and none from the earliest iteration of the cemetery. Also visible in the image is the trace pattern of the old 19th century graded pathways, which dotted the northern end of the cemetery prior to the current tabby walkways.
The brick vaults of today’s Colonial Park are curious, and geographically somewhat anomalous. Freestanding vaults and crypts are found in the region of New Orleans, but it is clear that in that case the water table may have mandated such constructions necessary. Savannah—with its pronounced elevation—was not faced with the same necessity. While brick vaults identical to those in Savannah are found in both Charleston and Beaufort, the sheer concentration of them in Colonial Park—there are 46 brick vaults remaining in Savannah’s Colonial Park today—suggests that this may have been the epicenter of this specialized vault tradition. The architects of these vaults are mostly lost to us today, but the December 28, 1821 City Council Minutes refers to Amos Scudder as the builder of the Screven vault “in the old burrying ground.”
In 1901, during a search for the remains of Major General Nathanael Greene, four of these brick vaults on the northern end of the cemetery were opened and their contents investigated. As the Savannah Morning News reported: “Lanterns were used in the vaults, as the openings did not admit enough light to reveal their contents clearly.” The newspaper took the opportunity to describe the interiors to its readership, which may be of interest to the contemporary reader.
“The style of construction of the vaults was found to be uniform. Transverse rows of brick walls ran along the floor, there being three or four of them, of a height, possibly, of twelve inches. Upon these were placed the coffins, as was clear from the positions in which the decayed fragments of bodies and caskets were found. In some of the vaults it was evident that coffins had been placed one above another.”
– Savannah Morning News, March 3, 1901
Who and what the vaults might have contained also might be of some interest. Of the four vaults above surveyed in 1901, the Wylly vault (far left) was found to contain the remains of at least three people whose names were recorded on the coffin plates—“Martha Wylly, aged 67 years”, “Sarah Ann Fulton, born Jan. 5, 1816, died April 27, 1852” and “Ann B. Pitt, died 1839, aged 63 years”. The Thiot vault (far right) was found to be empty, having apparently “been rifled of whatever it may have held.” The Jones vault (inner right) had been largely emptied by the DeRenne descendants following the closure of the cemetery and the family’s removal to Bonaventure; and though the Morning News confided that “the stench from the vault was greater than any of the others”, the only evidence remaining of habitation in the Jones vault was the coffin plate of one Mrs. Sarah S. Wood. The Graham-Mossman vault (inner left) was the final vault searched, and discovered to be the resting place of Nathanael Greene, son George Washington Greene, while “on the other side of the vault there was but one body, that of Mr. Robert Scott, of this city, who died in 1845, aged 70 years.” Clearly, in many instances these family vaults were home of repose to people who had never crossed paths in life.
Residing in Colonial Park today are four different generations of Savannah families, giving a face and spirit to otherwise musty names in history books and newspapers. Here lies William Scarbrough, merchant and chief backer of the steamship Savannah, the first steamship to successfully cross the Atlantic in 1819. Here lies Archibald Bulloch, the first president of Georgia; and James Johnston, founder of the Georgia Gazette, the first paper of the Georgia colony, and the eighth paper among the thirteen colonies. Here lay Major General Nathanael Greene, lost for 115 years in an unmarked vault on the north end before his remains were finally discovered in that 1901 search and removed to repose beneath his monument in Johnson Square. Here is Marie Elizabeth Malaurie, the oldest woman to be found in the cemetery; she was 93 when she died in 1842. And Anne Guerard, who died in her 41st year, “a few days after the birth of her fifteenth child, on July 11, 1793.”
A few excerpts appearing in the newspapers:
The above Blackstone, Hamson and Stimpson are just three among many without existing headstones today.
It started small…
The original tract of the cemetery was only a fraction of the park we see today. Originally measuring 100 feet square (+/-), it was a modest parish cemetery under the care of Christ Church. The cemetery was enlarged on three occasions, bringing it to its current size of roughly 500 feet by 500 feet by 1789. The first addition, made on April 17, 1763, extended it to Abercorn street and southward to a length of 210 feet, rendering it 210 feet on all four sides; a second addition on April 11, 1768, extended it east to the dimensions of 380 by 210 feet—it was this portion to which Christ Church would continue to claim ownership over the generations… a claim that was reaffirmed by the Georgia State Supreme Court in the 1880s, “which decided that Christ church was the successor of the colonial church and inherited its property.” (Savannah Morning News, April 12, 1895) The third and final addition was made on July 8, 1789, expanding it to its current dimensions spanning 5.8 acres in the middle of town. This new addition south of the Christ Church tracts “was specifically stated as a public burial ground for Christians of all denominations, and not for the exclusive use of… Christ church.” The cemetery remained in this uneasy and ill-defined conservatorship between Christ Church and the city for more than a century. The resulting cemetery of today exposes two distinct partitions… though there is no clear line of delineation; most of it is Protestant, but the southern half becomes progressively Catholic, with French and Irish names dominating the more sparsely populated southern half. The cemetery’s location—originally outside of town—became increasingly conspicuous as development spread around the tract. “The burial ground is too near the inhabited parts of the city,” observed one Letter to the Editor of the Republican in 1804. “Cemeteries are never sources of health to towns.”
“Lately attending a funeral, I observed that the lid of the coffin was not more than three feet from the surface of the earth, and that it was difficult, if not impossible, that the grave should have been dug deeper, owing to the looseness of the soil….”
– Savannah Republican, April 3, 1804
By 1804 such shallow burials would have attracted the disapproval of authorities; in 1803, 1810 and 1818 ordinances were passed instructing the sexton to “take due care that they be not less than six feet deep.” Further instructions included that “all the Graves which shall from time to time be dug in the said Burial-Ground, shall be at a distance of not more than two feet from the broken ground of one grave to the broken ground of the next, so that regularity and uniformity be observed as much as possible.” Surprisingly, there were few records ever kept for the cemetery; it wasn’t until October of 1803 that the City even mandated the creation of an official Death Register. But from 1803 to 1853 (just half the time the old South Broad Street Cemetery was in use) there were 13,345 deaths registered in the city. Today there are fewer than 700 markers in the cemetery, accounting for some 822 individuals… representing, in all likelihood, a mere fraction of the actual number of burials present. But as we’ll see shortly… not all were actually buried here.
“I very well remember when I was a boy, that there was a custom in Savannah of tolling the bell, not only when a person died, but during all the time the funeral was passing to the grave yard. The bell which was used on those occasions was that of the former Episcopal Church, which stood on the same site of the present. I recollect the sound of it as well as if I had heard it yesterday. The bell was indeed small, but still it was large enough to let the whole town know that divine worship was about to commence, or that some poor mortal had passed into immortality. In truth, at that time, most things here were on a small scale; and, if I am not mistaken, the bell-ringer himself, who was also sexton and grave-digger, was a very little man, to plague whom, was our usual evening sport. I think it was old Tom Burns. In those days, I thought not much of any one’s pleasures but my own, yet I have no doubt, that the old man felt as much real gratification in tolling that bell, and in telling to the curious enquirer the name of the deceased, and the causes of his death, as we did in brick-batting his house at night; or the old woman in circulating the scandalous stories of the village. I believe even then, however, when any person was sick in the town, a thing rather unusual at first, the old sexton had discretion enough to stop his bell, and to content himself with the less noisy mode of going round to every door in the place to tell the news. Why this old custom was given up, I could never learn, as I was out of the city at the time; but perhaps it was, that, as the population increased, it never happened that any one died, without there being some other very ill at the time; or perhaps the old man himself died; or, what is equally probable, that the little Episcopal bell was the only one in the town, and was melted in the great fire which destroyed the church; and thus it happened with this, as with many other useless or injurious customs; it ceased to be observed from some accidental cause….”
-unsigned letter to the Georgian, July 20, 1820
Clearly, Tom Burns could not hold a candle to Laban Wright, a later sexton of the cemetery, remembered with much fondness by one “R.H.C.”, writing in the September 29, 1873 Morning News:
Interestingly, there may have been a “Strangers Burial Ground” to the east of Colonial Park. While it is depicted in an 1813 map of the town, this burial tract does not appear elsewhere in the documentary record. However, the possibility of bodies on the site east of the cemetery would help to explain the curious mystery of why development of these lots was curtailed for so long; not until 1869 was the tract finally sold off and developed, with the erection of the police barracks. There could be undocumented bodies beneath the barracks, denizens of a cemetery forgotten for more than two centuries.
The African-American cemeteries of 1789 and 1810…
The same month of July, 1789 that saw the South Broad Street Cemetery’s final large addition also witnessed the creation of a cemetery for Savannah’s African-American communities. A cemetery for “people of colour” had been proposed as early as 1763, “laid out, and inclosed in a line with the said cemetery [South Broad],” but oddly, this cemetery does not seem to have seen implementation before 1789… at which point, apparently, it was laid out far to the south.
“And Whereas by an act of the General Assembly passed the seventh day of April 1763 Two hundred feet square on the common towards the five acre lots for the conveniency of a Burial Ground for Negroes was directed to be laid out.
“Be it further Ordained — That the County Surveyor be authorized and required, and he is hereby authorized and required to admeasure & lay out the said Two hundred feet square for a Burial Ground for the Said Negroes.”
– “Ordinance for enlarging the Cemetery,” July 29, 1789
In the interest of full disclosure, this author was previously under the impression this African-American cemetery adjoined today’s Colonial Park to the east, in the tract that may have been later incorporated as the Strangers burial ground, but a map drawn by City Surveyor John McKinnon in 1805 would seem to put any such a notion to rest. Consider the map below (note that this is one of the “upside down maps” where south is top & north bottom).
By 1810, however, this Negro Cemetery was either overfilled or underused; dead bodies were being buried in other town lots, threatening property values as the town began spreading south of South Broad. Passed in Council on September 3, 1810:
City Council attempted to halt once and for all the burial of persons of color anywhere outside of these recognized cemeteries. “It shall not be lawful to bury any dead body on any other part of the city common, or parts adjoining, under the penalty of Ten Dollars, for every body so buried.” The ordinance establishing the 200 x 200 foot 1789 cemetery was repealed, and now in its stead Council created a larger burial tract.
The 1810 replacement cemetery on the South Common, measuring 330 by 264 feet, seems to have adjoined—if not slightly overlapped—the southern end of the 1789 site. In 1813 a further amendment to the ordinance further altered the dimensions of this 1810 cemetery to be “three hundred feet in width and six hundred and fifty feet in length.” For the record, the promise of the “hence-forward and forever… burial place,” found above lasted only until the city’s development reached these southern boundaries, forty years later.
By law, the sexton was required to inspect each and every grave before interment, “and take care that they be not less than six feet deep; and that, for each grave thus inspected in said negro burying ground, he shall be entitled to receive the sum of fifty cents.” (Savannah Republican, September 22, 1818) The fee was “payable by the owners or friends of the person so buried.” (July 3, 1813)
While there were countless burials in these old African-American cemeteries, there may or may not have been many markers. William Harden later made reference to this cemetery on the South Common displaying few delineated markers, but instead sea shells or other mementos. “As late as 1851,” he remarked in his 1934 book, Recollections of a Long and Satisfactory Life, “the grave mounds were numerous, those of the negroes being plainly indicated by the ornaments laid upon them.” (p. 57) The September 29, 1887 Morning News, on the other hand, reflecting on the tract some thirty years later referred to “the old colored burying ground… where the graves were as ‘thick as leaves in Vallambrosa’.”
Laurel Grove South today hosts a small number of slave burials; these graves would have been originally located in the old 1789/1810 cemeteries and moved upon the opening of Laurel Grove in the 1850s. Many of these surviving headstones are modest, most are without dates, while many have no inscription at all.
Battle of the five cemeteries….
Only a few years after the replacement of the 1789 African-American cemetery with the 1810 version, the South Broad Street Cemetery, too, faced a replacement; a new counterpart was opened on the South Common, adjacent to the 1810 African-American Cemetery to the west.
This new cemetery occupied a similar position on the Abercorn line as its northern counterpart, simply “five hundred and sixty five yards south.” Hence, the new cemetery occupied what is today’s Calhoun Ward, with the western limit at Abercorn Street; the Negro Cemetery began west of Lincoln and extended deep into today’s Wesley Ward (though honestly, the exact position and dimensions of the 1810 Negro Cemetery changed from map to map through 1842; no map displayed the cemetery in the same place, nor attempted to display the 300 x 650 dimensions described by the 1813 ordinance). The image depicted here is from the 1842 map; two years later replacements for the 1810 and 1819 opened southeast of the hospital (their precise location & dimensions are currently unknown).
Though burials would continue in the South Broad Street Cemetery until 1853, it was effectively retired from regular use in 1819. The South Broad Street Cemetery was now reserved strictly as a legacy cemetery. As Mayor Thomas Usher Pulaski Charlton noted in August of 1820: “Except for the interment of persons having the bodies of relatives in the old cemetery, it is to be closed after the new cemetery is completed, and with the exception stated, no other interment permitted.” In short, only relatives of those already present would be interred within the old cemetery. As Mayor Charlton further opined: “A public burial place should never be in the midst of a city’s population, because it not only may injure the health, but impair the value of property in its neighborhood.” (Georgian, August 1, 1820)
Again with the property values…. But this new cemetery on the South Common never achieved the same affinity afforded to the old and odd, much-derided and overcrowded South Broad Cemetery. Two decades after its creation, the City Council recognized that there were “prejudices which now exist against what is now known as the New Cemetery.” By March 22, 1842, City Council had some benefit of hindsight in the competition of status between the two cemeteries. “The Ordinance in relation to the Cemeteries now in force, have been so for more than twenty years. For nearly one hundred years, there had been but one Cemetery for the whole City; and although a large one, time and death had so filled it, that it became evident that unless some means of were taken to limit the number of interments, detrimental consequences would ensue…. To obviate these consequences a new Cemetery was laid off and it was required by Ordinance that all such as had no relatives buried in the old Cemetery should be buried in the new…. A very mistaken idea seems to have obtained with some that the Ordinance in question makes the distinction between rich and poor. Such is not the case, as it requires imperatively that no person shall be buried in the old Cemetery except such as had relatives already buried there.”
Simply, the new cemetery was viewed as one of inferior status to the old one; the long-established legacy of the older outshone the newer. While it might seem strange to ascribe popularity to one cemetery over another, certainly the new one remained decidedly… unpopular. A motion was even considered that a fee of $100 for newcomers to be admitted into the South Broad Street Cemetery should be adopted… a notion rejected for the reason that it would only confirm that one cemetery was elitist and the other for the poor. And yet, almost comically—despite City Council’s above protestations—by 1853 even City Council had given up and was referring to the “new cemetery” as a “Potters Field.”
Set into motion, however, in the conclusions of this 1842 Committee report was the “suggestion for the future action of this Board, or of some one of its successors, the laying out of an entirely New Cemetery” was inevitable. In 1844 the cemeteries on the South Common were as filled as the cemetery on South Broad Street; the City Council recommended closing both of the cemeteries to the south due to the fact “that the ground cannot be broken without disturbing the remains of the dead.” The solution was to replace the 1810 and 1819 tracts with a brand new pair of cemeteries even farther to the south, just to the east of the hospital. As the September 29, 1887 Morning News would later reminisce of the newest tract: “There was a large cemetery just south and east of the Savannah Hospital. It was closed to interments about or about or just after the old [South Broad] cemetery was closed. It was the burial place of many of the active business men of Savannah, whose remains could not be deposited in the old cemetery because they were not to the manor born, or had no relations interred in it…. The hill on which that cemetery stood has been cut down to a level with the surrounding land. The dead lie only a foot or two below the surface. Streets have been run through and fine residences now stand where once stood vaults and monuments.” The November 21, 1885 Morning News also referred to the site, comparing it to the grandeur of its South Broad predecessor: “In that cemetery were monuments, tombstones, vaults and memorials just as there are to-day in the South Broad street cemetery.” In short, while these replacement white and African-American cemeteries east of the hospital may half lasted less than a decade, were little-remembered a generation later and left behind precious little in the documentary record, they may have actually been quite impressive in their very brief tenure.
One of the many problems one encounters today in trying to research these 1844 cemeteries is a frustrating lack of documentation on them. Even in the spring of 1844 an anonymous correspondent to the Daily Republican registered a similar observation. Complaining that the engineering contract was given to “an English gentleman, by the name of Quantock, without competition,” he suggested that there were no bids or advertisements through official channels.
Ultimately, even these 1844 cemeteries proved only a short term solution as the city began eyeing larger prospective tracts outside of town. As a correspondent prophesied within the June 14, 1845 Daily Republican: “Our city is advancing with rapid strides to the South, and ere long… the old cemeteries will be completely surrounded by the habitations of the living.”
With the city’s opening of Laurel Grove to the west in 1852, and the opening of the Evergreen Company’s Bonaventure to the east in 1848, Mayor Richard Wayne and City Council decreed that effective July 1, 1853, the old South Broad Street Cemetery would be closed against new burials. With this—and the spread of town over the South Common—all five burial tracts on or adjoining the Common were effectively retired in one fell swoop.
Not only was the old cemetery closed, but families were encouraged to move ancestors already interred. In 1852, the Mayor and City Council wished to “invite the removal of remains to the new ground, and it is hoped that in the process of time all our citizens who have relatives in the old cemetery will remove them to Laurel Grove.” As a result, in the decades that followed the cemetery’s closure hundreds of bodies were removed to the newer cemeteries… and those who had been laid down to eternal rest were suddenly travelers to different locations around town. Members of the Jones and Telfair families were moved to Bonaventure; the Gordons and the Lows became esteemed denizens of Laurel Grove.
Evidence of later removals are still apparent today. Outlines of former vaults dot the northern portion of Colonial Park:
In 1853 a Letter to the Editor penned by one “Old Mortality” complained of the messy and somewhat mercenary removal process that resulted.
“If the dead are to be thus dealt with in Savannah, may I be permitted to die elsewhere,” the correspondent concluded, further remarking quite aptly: “As it is, every cellar or well dug in certain parts of the city exposes sacred remains.”
Post-closure: days of neglect and abuse…
“One morning I was passing through the old Colonial cemetery on My way to school, which in those days had a high brick wall around it, with iron gates at the entrances for the convenience of pedestrians. On the side of the main walk I noticed a casket which had been thrown there by the [Federal] soldiers. It was still sealed and looking though the glass I saw a man in a perfect state of preservation. He was dressed in full Evening clothes with diamonds in his shirt front and a gold ring on his left hand finger. When I came back through on my way home the casket had been broken open and the jewelry had been taken off the body, which had gone down to nothing upon exposure to the air.”
– William H. Ray (undated)
Though contemporary folklore would favor the suggestion that Union soldiers were responsible for all of the vandalism that the cemetery has endured, the reality is that most of it was locally produced and thoroughly home-grown. Unused and untended, the South Broad Street Cemetery materially disintegrated over the following generation.
Today, the fire alarm bell known affectionately as “Big Duke” stands in the median of Oglethorpe Avenue, but it spent its earliest days seated in a corner of the cemetery. As the March 29, 1876 Morning News noted: “There being no room on the barracks lot for the tower ordered by Council for the fire alarm bell, ‘Big Duke,’ the structure has been located in the southeast corner of the old cemetery.” As the newspaper further noted, diplomatically: “This has occasioned some discussion.” The appropriateness of its placement and the right of the city to annex any part of the burial ground for such a purpose attracted vigorous discussion and threat of injunction to force a stop to tower construction. Quickly and quietly, the fire barracks found room for the 55 foot tower.
By this period of the 1870s the old cemetery had devolved into an overgrown enclosure reclaimed by weeds, a natural magnet for boys seeking adventure or mischief. “The youths who play policemen in the old brick cemetery, consider their prisoner safely lodged in the tombs when they secure one and roll him gently into an open vault,” the Savannah Morning News observed on March 5, 1875. Four years later the newspaper seemed less amused. “It is said that the Old Cemetery on South Broad street is frequented every day by a lot of loafers and boys with sling shots, and the latter shoot birds all day.” In February of 1878 the City Council, aware of the dangers and weary of complaints, temporarily shuttered the gates. A correspondent claiming the name of “Respect” applauded the move that others had protested.
One woman decided to take matters into her own hands. A “mysterious woman in a cemetery” would seem to be a common ghostly narrative… but a mysterious woman in the cemetery packing a revolver is entirely another story. From the April 22, 1879 Morning News:
As the Savannah Morning News editorialized in November of 1885, “the cemetery is abandoned to the weeds,” its vaults “disease-breeding places where snakes and lizards resort.” In March of 1888 a number of vaults were desecrated in a fit of vandalism, including the Hunter tomb, the George Schick vault and the John Moore vault. “In some instances entire front of some of the newer vaults of Philadelphia pressed brick have been demolished without making entry into them,” the Morning News of March 25, 1888 reported. “Both ends of the second vault to the right upon entering the South Broad street gates have been pulled out, and the grinning skull of an infant looks out at the beholder.” Below are portions of the article and the affected tombs as they stand today; the John Moore vault (described as existing on the north end of the cemetery) does not seem to still exist.
In 1869 a ladies’ association had contributed to the repair and care of the old cemetery, but in the two decades that followed neglect, apathy and abuse had taken a heavy toll on the cemetery. Louis Falligant felt compelled to write to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1887, urging harsher penalties against “the moral criminals… wishing to desecrate the interred bones and sacred ashes of our dead in the old cemetery.”
The other four cemeteries had been built over in the name of progress; many wondered why the South Broad Street Cemetery remained at all. Addressing the extinct cemeteries of 1810, 1819 and 1844, the September 29, 1887 Morning News opined: “These old spots have been leveled and made the sites of buildings. Foundations of houses stand surrounded by the very bones of the dead. Streets are laid out through them, and wagons are daily hauled over the graves, but there is no complaint.” Yet, anytime a suggestion was made to improve or alter the South Broad Street Cemetery, “there are protests and attorneys are sent to the Legislature to oppose them.”
Referring to the cemetery as “a sickening spectacle,” the Morning News continued that “a number of the vaults have so decayed that the rain pours in on the coffins that hold the bones of the dead. Doors have fallen off and a glance in shows rotted coffins and human bones fully exposed. One might carry away the bones of many of the dead, and their relatives would know nothing of it.”
By the 1890s debate raged over a proposal to open Lincoln Street through the cemetery. “It is one of the best streets in Savannah,” the Savannah Morning News opined on August 13, 1891, “and many people who are not imbued with sentiment can’t see why a cemetery should stand in the way of public improvement. The opening of Lincoln Street would be a convenience to the public.” Four decades after its usefulness had run out, the old site was in ruins, and the city’s long-simmering battle with the Christ Church over the condition of the property erupted into a legal fight. Finally, on November 6, 1895, following the prior September court decision, the cemetery the city came into full possession of the property following nearly 150 years of divided/divisive ownership. By court decree, the city paid Christ Church $6500 for full rights to the cemetery and turned it into a park… which was where we came in at the beginning of this post.
Images of the cemetery taken before and after the city’s improvements:
The creeping cemetery…
In 1967 excavators laying down electrical cables beneath Abercorn Street were startled to uncover a handful of bodies beneath the pavement of the street.
A fact not necessarily recognized in 1967: The cemetery was poorly surveyed from its earliest days and its brick wall ran crooked; in the words of a June 7, 1871 Ordinance, “by evident mistake in the original survey of said ground, the wall on the western side encroaches on the line of Abercorn street.” The eastern line of Abercorn Street—the cemetery’s western limit—has shifted 17.95 feet to eastward since the 18th century, as two centuries of surveyors gradually consolidated it to its current location. Throughout the 19th century a recurring complaint of the cemetery was that its awkward dimensions compressed Abercorn Street into a small lane. In the 1870s, during an aborted effort to remove its wall and extend Abercorn to its current dimensions, the Savannah Morning News reported that the objection and obstacle to this was “that part of the cemetery that would be required to make Abercorn street of the required width, between South Broad street and Perry street lane contains several memorial tablets… throwing a strip of the cemetery into the street.” (Savannah Morning News, November 20, 1885)
The cemetery’s wall was torn town in the spring of 1896. As the Savannah Morning News noted on March 16, 1896: “The bricks were old and dry, and the wall was easily tumbled down. The greater part of the wall on Abercorn Street and on South Broad street to Lincoln street was toppled over.” Abercorn Street was subsequently widened to its current dimensions, while the distinctive brick sidewalk adjoining the cemetery was laid between December of 1896 and January of 1897, at a cost of $500. As the November 21, 1896 Morning News promised: “The walk will be something of a novelty, as it will be laid with a brick made especially for sidewalks, and having a fluted surface.”
With a sidewalk width of nine feet, green space to the curb of seven feet and an Abercorn curb line that has likely shifted some eighteen feet, the math suggests that the cemetery has lost as much as twelve yards (+/- 35 feet) of its western portion, including the strip that was rudely rediscovered in 1967 as electrical cables were laid to power the new Desoto Hilton Hotel. Had the original dimensions of the cemetery remained intact to this day, Abercorn Street would likely be restricted to a narrow south-bound only lane, if extant at all.
The duellists…
Despite persistent tour guide lore of a dueling ground bordering the south of the cemetery, there is no evidence or the slightest suggestion of any duel ever fought there. As found elsewhere in this site, the City Pound south of the cemetery was instead an animal impound lot. Dueling in Savannah, however, was a way of life that claimed the lives of many, and is well represented in the old cemetery. One need look no further than the epitaph on the headstone of James Wilde, its slow weathering not weakening its impact over time:
“This humble stone records the filial piety fraternal affection and manly virtues of JAMES WILDE, Esquire, late district paymaster in the Army of the US. He fell in a duel on the 16 of January, 1815, by the hand of a man, who a short time before would have been friendless but for him, and expired instantly in his 22nd year, dying as he lived, with unshaken courage and unblemished reputation. By his untimely death the prop of a mother’s age is broken, the hope and consolation of sisters is destroyed, the pride of brothers humbled in the dust, and a whole family, happy until then, overwhelmed with affliction.”
Few details survive from Wilde’s unfortunate duel. It took place on the Carolina side of the river; after death his body lay in repose at a house on Franklin Square. An entry in the burial book made the following observations:
“James Wilde, aged 23, native of Baltimore, died January 16, 1815, paymaster 8th Regt. U.S. Infantry; duel; buried 17th. He was shot through the heart at the fourth discharge by his antagonist, Capt. R.P. Johnson, of the 8th Regt. U.S. Infantry. His corpse was conveyed from the fatal spot, on the north side of the Savannah river in South Carolina, to Mrs. Wilson’s Boarding House, facing the Baptist Church, and thence buried with military honors.”
Richard West Habersham (artist, writer and frequent “legacy contributor” to this blog) revealed what little he knew of the duel several decades later, offering color within his essay printed in the November 23, 1884 Morning News:
“The result of this duel,” Habersham concluded, “saved his antagonist from the fatal charge of cowardice, but intensified the hatred and contempt of his fellow officers to such a degree that he had to leave the army.” Before leaving, however, Johnson—described by Habersham as “a handsome, plausible and superficially pleasing man”—gained the affections of a local young heiress, married her and took her back to his native New Jersey, where he squandered her estate and ultimately deserted her. “On this, she returned to Carolina, and was at once taken into the family of him who was afterward my father-in-law, as a near relative and honored guest,” where Habersham came to know the woman in question personally.
Wilde’s brother Richard Henry Wilde (1789-1847) would find fame as US Congressman and published poet; his words are those gracing his brother’s headstone. But Wilde isn’t the only notable victim of a duel to be buried in the old cemetery.
Button Gwinnett and the woman beneath his monument…
Button Gwinnett was one of Georgia’s three signers of the Declaration of Independence, a man who died as a result of a duel, and whose body may or may not be buried within the cemetery. While it is easy to presume he was buried somewhere in those earlier tracts of the northern end, there is no record of his interment, and even in the event that he had a headstone there is very little likelihood that it would have survived the three and-a-half year British occupation during the American Revolution—after all, the names of the signers of the Declaration were not secret. But still, there was no documented effort made to locate the gravesite until 1957… 150 years after he died. In a search initiated by Savannah historian Arthur Funk a very likely spot was probed which did yield some remains, and with the remains a broken femur bone. It was well documented that during the duel Gwinnett had been struck through the leg bone, breaking the thigh bone. Hence, the remains were sent to the Smithsonian Institution to be analyzed; the results from the Smithsonian returned with the conclusion that the femur in question not only appeared undamaged in life, but also seemed to belong to a young woman.
Seven years after their exhumation, in 1964, the remains in question were reburied and a monument erected over the site to Button Gwinnett. In short… there is very likely a woman beneath the monument today.
Gwinnett’s duel is an interesting story—recorded by an eyewitness, and that leads to the next post….
Mary Cowper offers a final word…
“…The perishable marble will but a little while endure to record her name or worth here, and those who read it, and those who inscribe, shall also be mouldered into dust…”
Related offsite links:
The other cemeteries on the Common: Savannah’s ‘Negro Burial Grounds’ and ‘Strangers Burial Ground’, prepared by Luciana Spracher, Savannah Municipal Archives; March 2021
Want to know who was buried in Colonial Park? An incomplete list of the persons buried in Colonial Park Cemetery.
Fact-Checking Savannah's History 
“the only evidence remaining of habitation in the Jones vault was the coffin plate of one Mrs. Sarah S. Wood.”
This is most likely Sarah Saunders Wood who died in 1801. She was the wife of Jacob Wood, who in his will noted, “my vault in the Savannah burying ground”. Jacob Wood died in 1846 and is likely buried there somewhere. But where? In the Jones’ vault?
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