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American towns don't come much nicer than SAVANNAH
, seventeen miles up the Savannah River from the ocean, on the
border with South Carolina. The appealing Historic District
, ranged around Spanish-moss-swathed squares, formed
the core of the original city, and today boasts examples of just
about every architectural style of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, while the atmospheric cobbled waterfront on the
Savannah River , key to the postwar economy, is edged
by towering old cotton warehouses.
Savannah was founded in 1733 by James Oglethorpe
as the first settlement of the new British colony of Georgia.
His intention was to establish a haven for debtors, with no Catholics,
lawyers or hard liquor, and above all, no slaves. However, with
the arrival of North Carolinan settlers in the 1750s, the town
became a major export center, at the end of important railroad
lines by which cotton was funneled from far away
in the South. Sherman arrived here in December 1864 at the end
of his March to the Sea; he offered the town to Abraham Lincoln
as a Christmas gift, but at Lincoln's urging left it intact and
set to work apportioning land to freed slaves. This was the first
recognition of the need for ''reconstruction,'' though such concrete
economic provision was rarely to occur again.
The plantations floundered after the Civil War;
cotton prices slumped, and Savannah went into decline. There was
little industry beyond the port, and as that fell into disuse
and decay, so too did Savannah's graceful townhouses and tree-lined
boulevards. Not until the 1960s did local citizens start to organize
what has been, on the whole, the successful restoration of their
town recently, and tentatively, extended to the predominantly
Victorian District .
Savannah has acquired a new notoriety of late thanks
to its starring role in John Berendt's best-selling Midnight in
the Garden of Good and Evil ; For a sense of what goes on behind
closed doors in the city, it's an unbeatable read, and locals
delight in making dark hints as to how much they knew, or even
did, themselves. If you want to look behind the closed doors for
yourself.
