The Origin and Appreciation of Savannah, Georgia’s Historic City Squares

Abstract

The Origin and Appreciation of Savannah, Georgia’s Historic City Squares Louis de Vorsey (bio) Introduction In 1732 King George II conveyed the southern portion of Carolina to “The Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America.” A leading figure among that group, James Edward Oglethorpe, was the colony’s chief designer and founder. He traveled to America with the first colonists and laid out the town of Savannah in 1733. Integral to Oglethorpe’s Savannah plan was a gridiron street pattern punctuated by a series of open city squares. This plan is now an icon of New World urban planning thanks to the frequent reproduction and publication of the 1734 engraving entitled, “A View of Savannah as it Stood the 29th of March, 1734”. There can be no doubt that James Edward Oglethorpe was a utopian who expressed his ideals in the survey, layout, construction and functioning of Savannah and the greater region surrounding the city. He was certain his built environment would make it possible for England’s poor but worthy to start afresh and forge productive lives in the absence of strong drink and slavery, the bane of Carolina. In so doing, Georgians would form an imperial bulwark against the Spanish in Florida and the Indians and French of the interior. In this essay we will enquire into both Oglethorpe’s utopian and practical inspirations for Savannah’s spatial design. Savannah’s historic city squares will be shown to be a significant and enduring part of that plan. A brief summary of the appreciation of Savannah’s squares will conclude the essay. Oglethorpe as Utopian Utopia was born in 1516, when Thomas More’s book, Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus de optimo rei[publicae] statu deq[ue] nova Insula Utopia, was published in Louvain, Belgium. It was an immensely successful literary conceit in which More wrote of an ideal society on a far-away island called “Utopia” or literally a non-place. The book allowed More to engage in a sharp criticism of contemporary Europe’s, as he saw it, deeply flawed political, religious, economic, legal and social order. It was not long before the term ‘utopian’ came to describe schemes or persons that promised improbable and visionary perfection in social welfare. Let there be no doubt that Georgia’s founder and designer of Savannah’s city plan and squares, James Edward Oglethorpe, was a utopian (Spalding 1984). But, unlike Sir Thomas More, Oglethorpe was not simply a visionary. To the contrary, he planned, surveyed, built and peopled [End Page 90] his Utopia in the contested imperial march separating England’s South Carolina from Spain’s Florida. Oglethorpe was a soldier who had succeeded to his family estate, Westbrook, in Surrey near London, in 1718. Elected to Parliament in 1722, he soon distinguished himself as a hardworking member of that body. Oglethorpe evidenced an altruistic bent and became an advocate for England’s poor and downtrodden whom he came to know through his work as chairman of the Parliamentary committee charged with inquiring into “the State of the Gaols of this Kingdom” (Baine 1994, p 46). In 1730, Oglethorpe joined a group of like-minded associates in applying to the king for a charter to settle a colony for poor but worthy Englishmen, hoping to repair their fortunes and render valuable service to the empire in America. A charter for twenty-one years was granted to them in June of 1732 (Saye 1942). Unlike the existing colonies, Georgia was to be largely a charitable venture administered by twenty-one socially and politically prominent trustees. Throughout the Trust’s tenure, Oglethorpe was the only trustee ever to journey to Georgia. In his 1731 tract, Some Account of the Designs of the Trustees for establishing the Colony of Georgia in America, Oglethorpe made clear that Georgia contained “fertile Lands sufficient to subsist all the useless Poor in England, and distressed Protestants in Europe” (Reese 1972, p 69). Georgia was, in Oglethorpe’s telling, a bountiful land wanting only in people to “cut down Trees, build Houses, fortify Towns, and dig and sow the Land” (Reese 1972, p 69). He urged England to follow the...