Savannah

James Oglethorpe laid out Savannah in 1733 on a plan of wards, each built around a public square. Twenty-four were made and twenty-two survive. It is the oldest planned city grid in the United States still functioning as designed, and it means that walking six blocks in Savannah involves passing through five parks.

Photographs of the squares from the 1880s and 1890s show them already mature — live oaks with Spanish moss, monuments, benches, and the houses facing inward. That the plan worked is obvious in the images long before anyone wrote it up as urban theory.

Cotton is the other subject. Factors Walk runs along the bluff above the river, and the cotton factors — brokers — worked from offices there with iron walkways bridging to the buildings behind. Below, on River Street, the warehouses opened directly onto the wharves. The Savannah Cotton Exchange set world prices for a period in the 1880s.

The photographs of the riverfront show bales stacked in numbers that are difficult to take in, and the ships that carried them. The boll weevil ended it in the 1920s.

Sherman reached Savannah in December 1864 at the end of the March to the Sea and did not burn it, which is the reason so much of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century fabric survives to be photographed. He telegraphed Lincoln offering the city as a Christmas gift.

Bonaventure Cemetery appears in the archive too — a burial ground on a former plantation east of the city, with avenues of oaks. It was photographed extensively long before it became famous through a book, and the earlier images are quieter and better.

Around twelve hundred and sixty images in the archive name Savannah, which places it well ahead of cities several times its size.

The College, the Green and the Carriage Trade