So we packed up this morning, waved good-bye to the very nice Oglethorpe Inn & Suites, and headed to downtown Savannah to check out Forsythe Park, which we hadn't had time for yet. This is a large park on the north end of downtown, created in the 19th century to give the folks in town some outdoor space in which to spend their leisure time, especially those folks who didn't have property outside of town. Very pretty, with the live oaks, the Spanish moss, and a beautiful fountain. Very picturesque!
Of course, its also supposedly the location of mass graves of victims of the various yellow fever epidemics to that occurred over the years. Learned all about that during the ghost tour. Blech.
After the park, we headed to our last Savannah site, and that was the Isaiah Davenport house. I'm sure the only person who will be remotely interested in this part is my mother. The significance of this house is two-fold. One, its built in the Federalist style, very popular in the northern states around the early 1800s, but not something you ever really saw in Savannah at all. Isaiah Davenport was a carpenter from the north, who moved south and stayed, and decided he wanted a home like those up north. But what really makes this house important is the fact that, in the 1950s, it was slated to be torn down. Seven very motivated and well-connected Savannah women managed to raise enough money to save and restore the house in the 1960s. This touched off a veritable tidal wave of architectural preservation and restoration by these same 7 women that resulted in the town that Savannah is today. Because of the strict architectural rules put in place as result of all this, you don't see any architectural styles in the historic district from later than 1962 (or something like that). Reminded me of Cape May, NJ. We had a really great tour of the house by a really great tour guide, a woman who'd retired to outside Savannah from New York state (all these transplants!!).
After that we grabbed some ice cream, and hopped on the road to Atlanta. Some observations from the road include:
1) We saw an entire children's playground on a trailer behind a truck.
2) Saw the Clarence Thomas Interchange on I-16 outside Savannah.
3) Georgia's roads are as bad as, if not worse than SC's and PA's.
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