When we went to the Colonial Park Cemetery, I also shot a video to give a better impression of the park, but I never got around to posting it. Enjoy this look at one of Savannah’s most beautiful areas.
A historical marker in Savannah’s Colonial Park Cemetery reports that “nearly 700″ victims of the 1820 yellow fever epidemic are buried there. In fact, exactly six-hundred and sixty-six people died of the disease. But the church had issues with putting the Number of the Beast on a sign, and demanded the figure be rounded.
That’s just one of the disquieting anecdotes of the Colonial Park Cemetery, which was originally established around 1750 and closed to burials before the Civil War. Another concerns the original size of the cemetery — today, it fits nicely into a square bounded by Abercorn, Oglethorpe, Habersham and Perry, but it used to be much bigger. Colonial Park had initially been well outside the city, but as Savannah grew, the cemetery’s land was needed. And since digging up and moving bodies is so troublesome and costly, corpses were left where they were, and just the headstones were scooched into the new bounds of the cemetery. So every building surrounding Colonial Park is built on top of the desecrated dead… 666!!!
A number of prominent Georgians are buried in Colonial Park, though I’ll confess to have never heard of any of them… someone called Button Gwinnett has the most impressive monument. After the Civil War, occupying Union troops were garrisoned there, and some soldiers amused themselves by defacing tombstones, changing dates and names. It’s fun to hunt for these… I found one woman who died at 12 years of age, and had a son who passed a year later at the age of 14.
A green, creepy oasis of death in the center of Savannah, Colonial Park Cemetery is the perfect place for a stroll on cold, sunny, winter afternoons… but if you can’t make it there, enjoy our pictures!
- Visit also the Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah
Known as one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the entire country, Bonaventure is found on the outskirts of Savannah, bordering the Wilmington River across from Whitemarsh Island. Its name means “Good Fortune”, and those buried on its grounds might certainly consider themselves fortunate.
We’ve been tossing around the word “haunting” a lot as our exploration of Savannah continues, but what can we do? We’ll resort to it again with Bonaventure, where Spanish Moss hangs sorrowfully from every tree, casting broken light onto solemn fields of gravestones. Bonaventure Cemetery is absolutely haunting.
We wandered around for hours, discovering tombstones of exquisite craftsmanship and peculiar intrigue. There’s one in the form of a broken tree trunk. A grinning marathon runner. Obelisks and gates. Downcast girls holding flowers. Underground crypts. And of course, Little Gracie Watson.
Bonaventure is full of ghosts, and its most famous is that of Gracie Watson. In life, the vivacious daughter of the manager of the Pulaski House had been beloved by neighbors and well-known to the hotel’s guests. But pneumonia didn’t love Little Gracie. Pneumonia snuffed her out at the age of six. Her grief-stricken father commissioned the statue to mark her grave, and ever since, there have been rumors of the soft sobbing of a little girl in Bonaventure. The statue supposedly sheds tears, and screams out at night if someone removes one of her flowers.
Besides Gracie, a number of famous people rest their bones in Bonaventure, including Johnny Mercer, Conrad Aiken and Henry R. Jackson. One statue you won’t find there, though, is the Bird Girl statue made famous from the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil — it’s been moved to the Telfair Museum of Art, for safekeeping. That’s a shame, but there’s plenty else to see in Bonaventure. Plan at least a couple hours.
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