- Most Popular Tour!
- 2 Hours Duration 2 Hours
- Public Tour Category Public Tour
Discover the 1750’s riverside plantation turned 204 acre Victorian cemetery with Bonaventure’s longest established & most highly reviewed company!
Quick Details
“The locals’ favorite cemetery.”
First daily site tours, ever! – Help us grow!
Whereas the world hears much about Bonaventure Cemetery, Savannah’s greatest cemetery secret remains Laurel Grove Cemetery. This former rice plantation turned 67-acre cemetery out of a grudge towards city officials, sold out of burials at the end of The Victorian Age and remains mysteriously undiscovered by travelers.
Yet, arguably, it is Savannah’s most beautiful cemetery in terms of burial architecture, iron work, mausoleums and stone carving. Interestingly, while Bonaventure was like the yacht club, Laurel Grove was reflective of the true communal spirit Oglethorpe designed Savannah to be. The cemetery has not only the graves of the wealthiest and most powerful but the poorest of the poor, including a Stranger’s Section & Public Holding Vault for The Unknown!
The Civil War Sections hold some 1,500 soldiers, some Union soldiers and 8 Confederate Generals.
Laurel Grove is also where Women’s History shines with Girl Scout’s Founder, Juliette Low, “The Waving Girl,” Florence Martus, Kahlil Gibran’s artist confidante benefactress, Mary Haskell-Minis, and famed nurse, Phoebe Pember, just to name a few.
And can your life be complete without taking your children or your own eternal child to visit the grave of the author of “Jingle Bells,” James Pierpont? We think not! Pound for pound, Laurel Grove Cemetery is unquestionably the most directly connecting to everything that still stands in the nearby Savannah Historic District.
Tour includes:
Photos are the courtesy of Alissa Lee Nicholson. Please visit Forest City Of The South for more.