COLONIAL PARK CEMETERY GOD’S ACRE TOUR

Tour Colonial Park Cemetery

“Hedged in by city streets and tradition blest lies a sleeping township…”

– Elfrida De Renne Barrow

Now including 6:00PM to 8:00PM! Great pre-dinner or post-dinner event!

God’s Acre or “that old burying ground,” located in the heart of the town grid of 24 city squares, is the unofficial 25th known as Colonial Park Cemetery and serves as the biggest story spot in the whole Historic District! The grounds defy time as the oldest patch of public land one can visit in Savannah and where you’ll see and touch materials far older than the surrounding Victorian city!

During Savannah’s primitive hours, this is where every town meeting, picnic, wedding, duel and public execution was conducted! Eventually, it would become the final resting place of warriors of Independence, duelists, merchants, priests, paupers, soldiers and just about every character that gave blood, sweat, and tears to the early colony and, later, nation. Sadly, it would also be the mass grave of thousands of Yellow Fever victims that resulted in the closure of the place in 1853. Had the Daughters of The American Revolution and Columbia University not saved it from demolition in 1902, there would be no Colonial Park Cemetery tour for us to give!

Discussions will include the adjoining “Negro Burial Ground,” Poet Conrad Aiken’s Birthplace, The Old City Jail, dueling grounds, The Hanging Tree and the fascinating ritual use of the cemetery by area Root Doctors.

Tour includes:

• Savannah’s Oldest Extant Cemetery, c 1750
• Origin of “Savannah, the city built on top of its own dead”
• 2 Declaration of Independence Signers
• Teddy Roosevelt’s Great, Great Grandfather
• Nathanael Greene & George Washington Greene
• Encampments by both British Army & Union Army
• Mass Yellow Fever Graves
• Dueling Grounds
• Gullah Geechee Ritual Grounds & Burial Areas
• Old City Jail & Poet Conrad Aiken Discussions

Photos are the courtesy of Alissa Lee Nicholson. Please visit Forest City Of The South for more.