A riverside cemetery outside Savannah
Bonaventure Cemetery, on Greenwich Road outside Savannah, began as the family burying ground of a colonial-era plantation owned by John Mullryne and later Commodore Josiah Tattnall III, who sold the 600-acre property to hotelier Peter Wiltberger in 1846. The first public burials followed in 1850, and the ground has operated as a cemetery ever since.
A plantation's family graveyard becomes a public cemetery
Bonaventure Cemetery is a public cemetery today, run by the city of Savannah, and still open to visitors every day with no admission fee. Live oaks hung with Spanish moss shade long rows of family plots and stone angels, all overlooking the slow water of the Wilmington River.
The ground was a plantation first. John Mullryne owned it in the colonial period and kept a small family burying ground on the property, the seed of everything that followed. His descendant, Commodore Josiah Tattnall III, later owned the land himself. Josiah Tattnall was born here, and he would be buried here too, decades on.
On March 10, 1846, Tattnall sold the 600-acre plantation, graveyard included, to a Savannah hotelier named Peter Wiltberger. Wiltberger saw the view and the oaks and decided to turn the plantation into a proper cemetery. The first burials went in starting in 1850. Three years later, Wiltberger himself was carried into a family vault on the grounds he had bought.
William H. Wiltberger, Peter Wiltberger's son, built on that start. In 1868, he organized the Evergreen Cemetery Company to run the place formally, selling plots to anyone in Savannah who wanted one. The cemetery grew for decades under private ownership, filling with the city's merchants, soldiers, and ministers.
John Muir slept among the graves for six nights
By the early 1900s, Evergreen Cemetery held Savannah's dead across generations, but the city wanted it under public control. On July 7, 1907, Savannah bought the Evergreen Cemetery Company outright. The city renamed the grounds Bonaventure Cemetery, the name it carries now.
Long before that sale, one visitor had already made the place famous in his own way. In October 1867, the naturalist John Muir stopped here during his thousand-mile walk to Florida. John Muir had no money yet for the next leg of his trip, so he slept in the cemetery for six nights, among the graves, calling it the safest and cheapest lodging he could find. He wrote a long chapter about it afterward, "Camping in the Tombs," describing the cemetery as breathtakingly beautiful.
The ground also holds a quieter, harder history. Confederate general Hugh W. Mercer is buried here, and so is fellow general Alexander Lawton. Josiah Tattnall, who sold the land in 1846, came home to it in 1871, buried not far from where he was born.
A statue on a book cover drew crowds here
In 1933, the city folded the neighboring Greenwich Cemetery into Bonaventure, adding more ground along the bluff. Through the twentieth century, the cemetery kept drawing Savannah's notable dead. The poet Conrad Aiken was buried here in 1973, his widow beside him nineteen years later. The actor Charles Coburn followed in 1961, and the actress Edythe Chapman rests here too, beside her husband.
The turn came in 1994, when John Berendt published Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Its cover photograph, taken by Savannah photographer Jack Leigh, showed a small statue called the Bird Girl, standing quietly among the graves. The statue had stood in the cemetery, mostly unnoticed, for decades. After the book and Clint Eastwood's 1997 film made it an icon, so many visitors came looking for it that the city moved it. In 1997, the Bird Girl left Bonaventure for the Telfair Museums downtown, where it still stands.
The photographer who made it famous is buried here
In 1997, the Bonaventure Historical Society formed to document and protect the cemetery's history, building an index of its burials. Jack Leigh, the photographer whose picture had changed the cemetery's fortunes, was buried here himself after his death in 2004.
Bonaventure remains an active cemetery today, still selling plots to Savannah residents, still free to enter from eight in the morning until five at night. Its administrative offices sit near the entrance, run by the city's Department of Cemeteries.
A harder chapter of the region's history lies miles away, down the coast. At Fort Pulaski, thirteen Confederate officers held as prisoners during the winter of 1864 and 1865 died of dysentery, scurvy, and pneumonia, fed on rancid cornmeal. They were part of a group of Confederate prisoners known as the Immortal 600, and they were buried in a small cemetery at the fort's northwest corner.
Live oaks and gravestones still line the bluff above the Wilmington River, open to anyone who walks in.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.