If you know nothing about life in Savannah during the Civil War, you’ll learn something about it from the driver/guides of the local trolley tours (mentioned in detail in the neighborhood squares post in this series).
At the end of March 2022, I was moved by the story of Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops damaging countless graves in
Colonial Park Cemetery, which is situated in the heart of the Sannah’s Old Historic District at Olgethorpe Avenue and Abercorn Street, just two blocks east of Chippewa Square. (Chippewa Square perhaps is best-known for hosting the bus stop where Forest Gump ruminated about how his mother compared life to a box of chocolates in that “You never know what you're going to get.”)
Colonial Cemetery was established in 1750 and was expanded three times before reaching its current 6 acres in 1789. It was closed to new interments in 1853. More than 700 people who died during the yellow fever epidemic in 1820 are among the deceased there.
When the Union Army occupied Savannah during the last months of the Civil War in December 1964, hundreds of soldiers used the cemetery grounds as a camp. It is said that it was a cold winter, and during their time there, many soldiers vandalized graves so they could use vaults for sleeping accommodations and removed and or defaced many gravestones. Some even etched on the stones to change dates or other information.
The soldiers’ damage was so severe that once the war ended, townspeople had difficulty ascertaining where displaced, strewn gravestones should be returned on the grounds. They decided to build a brick wall along the cemetery’s eastern perimeter and display those disassociated grave markers along the wall. This way, at least the deceased would have their markers in the cemetery somewhere, even if it couldn’t be matched correctly with the grave sites.
I had not known about this part of the cemetery’s history on my prior visits to Savannah, in 2017 and 2018.
The vast amount of space in Colonial Park Cemetery looks like a normal cemetery, as depicted in the pictures above and first two below, which I took in March 2017. In fact, before returning to the burial grounds at the end of March 2022, this was my recollection of the place.
The photo above and the next four below give a perspective of the east-perimeter brick wall, from its north end to the south. It is where grave markers displaced by Union soldiers in 1864 were recovered and installed by townspeople after the Civil War and given a permanent home because it was impossible to ascertain which graves they belonged to.
Above: The wall memorial as seen looking northeast from near its terminus at the south end of the cemetery.
Above and next six below show closer subsections of the wall, including a few closeups with information about the deceased whose graves were vandalized. Some of the markers even reflect various degrees of damage.
Above and next three below: A few more views of the rest of the cemetery.
Coming next: St. Bonaventure Cemetery
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