3 Days in Savannah

The Oglethorpe Plan is the reason Savannah feels different from other American cities. Each ward was a public square surrounded by four blocks of house lots and four civic blocks, repeated across the bluff. By 1851 there were 24 squares, three were lost to traffic and parking, and one was reclaimed in 2010, so 22 remain. Johnson Square, the first and largest, holds General Nathanael Greene's grave and Christ Church.

Bull Street strings five of them together, from Johnson to Monterey, and day two walks the southern ones. Chippewa Square is where the film Forrest Gump put its bench, which was a prop and isn't there. The plan has an uncomfortable footnote: Oglethorpe's colony banned slavery at first, but by 1800 enslaved people outnumbered free people in the city, 8,201 to 5,146. Calhoun Square, named for a slaveholding politician, became Taylor Square in 2024, for Susie King Taylor, the first Black nurse of the Civil War.

The Owens-Thomas House was designed by the English architect William Jay and finished in 1819, and it's counted among the finest Regency houses in North America. Lafayette spoke to the crowd from its iron veranda in 1825. The tour spends as much time behind the house as in it: the carriage house held the quarters of the enslaved cook, nanny and butler, and it was rediscovered during a 1990s renovation. It's one of the best-preserved urban slave quarters in the South.

Tours take 45 to 60 minutes, in groups of up to 12. Check in on site for a time, even if you bought your ticket elsewhere. If you do one house museum, make it this one.

Two blocks south is the burial ground of the colonial town. Colonial Park Cemetery opened in 1750 and took the city's dead for 103 years. It became a city park in 1896, so the gravestones now stand among people cutting through on their way to work.

It's six acres, so a loop takes half an hour. Read the weathered stones rather than the ghost-tour legends. The Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist, the city's Catholic mother church, stands a few blocks east near Lafayette Square and is worth a look from outside.

Leopold's has been scooping since 1919, when three Greek brothers opened the first shop. The Broughton Street shop is a re-creation by a family member who became a Hollywood producer, with a soda fountain and a sandwich counter.

Expect a line, especially after lunch and dinner. Go mid-afternoon, or eat dessert before your meal.

Take one of the cobbled ramps down from Bay Street, 40 feet below, to the river. River Street is now two miles of restaurants, candy shops and bars in the old cotton warehouses, and the cobbled ramps of Factors Walk above it are walled with ballast stone. A factor sold planters' cotton on commission, and the Cotton Exchange was founded on Bay Street in 1876. Before the Civil War, most of the cotton shipped from here was grown by enslaved people, and some of the waterfront buildings are also said to have held enslaved people before sale.

It's the most touristy street in the city and it knows it, with fudge and pralines by the pound. Come late in the afternoon, walk to the Waving Girl statue at the east end, and ride the free Belles Ferry across the river and back.

The pink stucco mansion at 23 Abercorn Street, on Reynolds Square, was built in the late 1700s for the cotton factor James Habersham Jr. and survived the fire of 1796. It's now a restaurant serving Lowcountry food, meaning the rice, shrimp, pork and seafood of the Georgia and Carolina coast.

Book ahead. If it's full, any restaurant that lists shrimp and grits is a safe first-night choice.

Juliette Gordon Low was born in this house on October 31, 1860. It was built in 1820 and was the first National Historic Landmark in Savannah. She founded the first Girl Guide troop here in 1912, and the group became the Girl Scouts in 1915. Her father was a cotton broker who joined the Confederate army, so even this story starts in cotton money.

The draw is the story, not the architecture. Tours are guided.

Mrs. Wilkes' started as a boarding-house dining room in the 1870 house at 107 West Jones Street, and Sema Wilkes ran it from 1943 until she died in 2002. Her family still does. You line up on the sidewalk, then you're seated at a table of ten you share with strangers. There's no menu: the bowls come out and you pass them around, fried chicken, greens, cornbread and whatever else the kitchen made that day.

It's open Monday to Friday, 11 to 2, for cash or checks only (an ATM is on site). It also closes on several holidays and from January 1 to about mid-February. You're paying for the experience as much as the food, and it's still the most Savannah meal there is.

Jones Street is just over a mile long and often called one of the prettiest streets in the country. It's named for John Jones, an aide at the 1779 Siege of Savannah, and the best blocks are either side of Bull Street, between Madison and Monterey Squares.

There's nothing to buy and nothing to queue for. Walk it slowly in one direction and come back on the other side of the street to see the stoops and iron railings.

The Italianate mansion at 429 Bull Street, on Monterey Square, was started in 1860 for General Hugh Mercer, great-grandfather of the songwriter Johnny Mercer, though no Mercer ever lived there. The antiques dealer Jim Williams bought it in 1969 and restored it. In 1981 he shot Danny Hansford, his employee, in the study. Four murder trials followed, the last ended in acquittal, and John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) told the story.

Only part of the house is open, and tours run every 20 to 40 minutes. It's best for fans of the book and of antiques. Skip it if the book means nothing to you.

Forsyth Park is 30 acres at the south end of the Historic District, and its fountain, installed in 1858, sits at the end of a straight line down Bull Street. It was cast by a foundry in the Bronx in New York and is dyed green every St. Patrick's Day. The park also holds a large Confederate memorial from 1874, with the soldier added in 1879.

Walk the long central path to the fountain, then circle the Fragrant Garden. It's where locals run, picnic and play, and the best light is late afternoon. It's outside the everyday to-go cup zone.

The Savannah College of Art and Design was founded in 1978, started classes in 1979 with 71 students, and now has more than 17,000 across its campuses. It has restored dozens of old buildings downtown, including a school on Chatham Square and the Lucas Theatre. So the Historic District is partly a campus, with students sketching on the squares and galleries in former shops.

Walk Broughton Street, the downtown shopping street, and look at the Lucas Theatre, where SCAD holds its film festival, usually in late October or early November. If something is on, a ticket makes a good evening. If not, finish with a drink in a plastic cup, which brings us to the rules.

Wormsloe was the plantation of Noble Jones, one of the first settlers of the colony. He built a fortified house of tabby, a concrete of oyster shells and lime, between 1739 and 1745, and the ruins still stand. It's best known for the 1.5-mile avenue of live oaks that leads to the site.

The oak avenue is the reason to come. The museum, trails and ruins take about an hour on foot, and a corner of the grounds has recreated colonial buildings. Wormsloe was worked by enslaved people: the Jones family held more than 350 across their lands by the Civil War. It's about eight miles southeast of downtown on Skidaway Road.

Bonaventure Cemetery covers nearly 160 acres on a bluff above the Wilmington River, on the site of a former plantation. The first burials were in 1850. Live oaks draped in Spanish moss shade the family plots, and you can find the graves of the lyricist Johnny Mercer and the poet Conrad Aiken.

It became famous through Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and the Bird Girl statue on its cover. The statue left in 1997 and is now at the Telfair Academy, so you won't find her here. This is a working cemetery, not a film set: keep to the paths and don't climb on monuments. It's about four miles east of downtown and open daily 8 to 5, according to the City of Savannah.

Fort Pulaski took 18 years to build, from 1829, and was finished in 1847, with walls 11 feet thick made from an estimated 25 million bricks. A young Robert E. Lee worked on it as an engineer. It was thought to be unbreakable. In April 1862 Union gunners on Tybee Island fired rifled cannon at it, and within 30 hours the walls were breached. Brick forts were obsolete almost overnight.

Walk the ramparts, the moat and the cannon, then cross to the prisoner-of-war burial ground. There is little shade on the island. The park is at 41 Cockspur Island Road, 15 miles east of Savannah on US 80. Children 15 and under are free.

Tybee Island is a barrier island 18 miles east of Savannah. The Crab Shack, at 40 Estill Hammock Road just off US 80 on the way in, is a long-running waterfront seafood place and the easiest lunch on this route. South Beach, around Tybrisa Street and the pier, has more restaurants but costs you time and parking.

Order local shrimp, fried in a basket or in a Lowcountry boil, and don't linger: the lighthouse is next.

The Tybee Island Light is the fourth tower on this spot. Oglethorpe had the first built of wood in 1736, and a storm felled it in 1741. The current tower grew from a 100-foot brick lighthouse of 1773. It's the oldest and tallest in Georgia, and the beacon still works.

Climb the tower for the view over the river mouth and the Atlantic, then walk down to North Beach. In November the beach is for walking, and sunset comes at about 5:30.