Photo of the Day: William Washington Gordon Monument, Savannah, GA

By now, Faithful Reader, you have figured out that I am utterly enthralled by the city Savannah. Just about every one of its squares is filled with beauty, history and mystery. One excellent example downtown is Wright Square, which contains the unusual monument in the attached photo that I took over a year and a half ago, when I made a short dash into the city

Does the name William Washington Gordon ring a bell? If you think you vaguely recall it, I’ll give you a stronger hint; the phrase “Girl Scouts.”

Yes, Gordon was the grandfather of Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts in America. But he meant a great deal more to Georgia in the antebellum period: its first West Point graduate, a prominent lawyer, state legislator, mayor of Savannah, and president of the Central Railroad and Banking Company, the state’s first railroad.

That last position consumed so much energy in the last six years of his life that he died exhausted in 1842, at only age 46. The Central Railroad had a monument erected in his honor 40 years later. That cenotaph, designed by the Boston firm Van Brunt and Howe, contains four red granite columns with Corinthian capitals supporting four winged figures that hold a globe. The four figures—agriculture, manufacturing, commerce and art—symbolize the fruits of the kind of prosperity hoped for in the railroad.

But placing this tribute in Wright Square meant displacing someone perhaps more essential to the very foundation and survival of Savannah. Chief Tomo-Chi-Chi had been a crucial ally of James Oglethorpe when the Englishman founded the colony in 1733, helping to establish a military outpost against Spanish invasion and assuring peace with the other tribes in the area.  He had been buried in the center of Wright Square with a pyramid of rocks formed over his grave.

Gordon’s daughter-in-law, Nellie Kinzie Gordon, an admirer of the chief, was annoyed when the railroad placed the cenotaph directly over the Native American’s grave. She pushed to erect a large piece of Georgia granite in Wright Square, explaining Tomo-Chi-Chi’s significance. It was the first act of public service by the organization she founded, the Georgia Society of the Colonial Dames of America.

Photo of the Day: Where Forrest Gump Sat: Savannah’s Chippewa Square

Chippewa Square, one of 24 squares planned by Gen. James Oglethorpe when he founded Savannah in 1733, is now at the heart of the city’s entertainment district, principally because of the Historic Savannah Theatre. But its claim to fame in entertainment gained an even bigger boost from a film scene 20 years ago. A leaf floated from the nearby Presbyterian Church onto a bench in this park, where a holy innocent of the postwar era, Forrest Gump, would relate his astonishing adventures to passersby.

Tourists still come repeatedly to that site. I was lucky enough to see the bench in 1999, when I first visited the coastal city. But when I returned for an afternoon visit this month, the bench had been moved to the Savannah History Museum.

Still, the memories of that emblematic scene linger, as does the wonder that sweeps over a visitor in beholding this park.

This Day in American History (Oglethorpe Founds Savannah)

February 12, 1733 –General James Oglethorpe, an English politician whose particular philanthropies were prison reform and relief for debtors, landed at the site of what is now the present-day city of Savannah, establishing Georgia, the last of the thirteen original colonies

He may have been born English, but Oglethorpe seems peculiarly American in his idealism. 

It shouldn’t be held against him that so many of the ideals he advocated in his colony—peaceful coexistence with Indians, a ban on slavery, land reform, and improvement of the lot of prisoners—did not last long in practice.

The same year he founded Savannah, Oglethorpe wrote An Account of Carolina and Georgia, in which he related a particularly vivid picture of the Native Americans he had encountered in the area while negotiating a peace treaty with Yamacraw chief Tomochici:

“They are a generous good-natured people, very humane to strangers; patient of want and pain; slow to anger, and not easily provoked; but when they are thoroughly incensed, they are implacable; very quick of apprehension, and gay of temper. Their publick conferences shew them to be men of genius, and they have a natural eloquence, they never having had the use of letters.”

I found Oglethorpe’s description in Literary Savannah, edited by Patrick Allen. Other accounts of the city in this tastefully selected volume were written by natives of the area (Conrad Aiken, Girl Scout founder Juliette Gordon Low, and the incomparable composer Johnny Mercer) or by such visitors as William Dean Howells, John Muir, and William Tecumseh Sherman (though the term “visitor” might not be the one that Civil War residents and their descendants might conjure up concerning the latter).

Like most schoolchildren, I learned years ago that Oglethorpe planned Georgia as a place where debtors could begin all over again as farmers, merchants and other upstanding members of the community. I did not realize, though, until I started researching this, how quickly the dream came apart.

The other members of the board of trustees only wanted those individuals most likely to help the fledgling colony succeed. They did not count those in prison for debt in this class. In the end, they did not choose even one formerly jailed debtor among the original colonists.

Georgia’s early settlers tired of Oglethorpe’s paternalism (the colony’s trustees, not the original settlers, were entrusted with making laws), carping so much about his defense tactics against Spain that he was eventually forced to return home to clear his good name. 

But, as his attitude toward Native Americans, as well as his original impulse in founding the colony, demonstrate, Oglethorpe operated from generous, often enlightened impulses.

Oglethorpe’s unique design for Savannah, based on neighborhoods clustered around 21 squares, impressed me greatly when I visited this beautifully preserved Southern city in late October 1999. 

My timing was good for several reasons: I had missed the worst of the summer heat and hurricane season; I had arrived during the week surrounding Halloween, when the city loves to highlight its Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil past; and I had happened upon the making of a major motion picture, The Legend of Bagger Vance.

For cultural tourists such as myself, Savannah is a splendid feast for the eye—especially if you’re both history and film buff, like myself. 

The photo accompanying this blog entry, taken from elsewhere on the Web, shows Chippewa Square—serendipitously, not just the square with General Oglethorpe’s statue by famed Lincoln Memorial sculptor Daniel Chester French, but also the site of the park bench made famous in Forrest Gump.

I had no idea about The Legend of Bagger Vance when I came upon its location shots in the city, and the finished product—much like Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—turned out to be a disappointing mishmash, not up to the best of its director’s other work. But what a thrill it was to be in the presence of so much screen history!

All over the city, I found vintage-1930s cars placed on the streets for shooting. But best of all, I witnessed the stars and director of the film shooting the courthouse scene.

Several times, Charlize Theron (easy to pick out anyway, with her blonde hair and tall frame) recited her lines from the top of the steps. Matt Damon and Will Smith sent hundreds of females among the onlookers into sustained squalls of giddiness just with a smile and a wave of the hand.

And then there was director Robert Redford—smaller in person, but, from a distance, where you couldn’t see the lines increasingly evident onscreen, still the same blond hair and energy, almost like a surfer who had improbably come onto this film set. 

At one point, to get a better angle on the courthouse, he jumped off the stage and plunged into the crowd, which parted like the Red Sea for him.

I expect to be writing more about Savannah at other times in this blog. It is that fascinating a city.