Andrew Low House

This house has hosted a Confederate general, a cotton fortune, and the birth of an organization that would one day span the globe. Not many houses in Savannah can claim all three.

It was built in 1849 for Andrew Low, one of the wealthiest cotton factors in the city... a man whose fortune came from the same trade that built so much of this district.

Low entertained the powerful and the famous here for decades, and in 1870, one of his closest friends came to stay.

Robert E. Lee, five years removed from the war and touring the South with his daughter, spent the night under this roof, a guest in Low's home after an evening of supper with mutual friends across town.

But the story that makes this house matter far beyond Savannah didn't come from General Lee.

It came from a woman the family called Daisy.

Daisy was born Juliette Gordon, and in 1886 she married Andrew Low's son, William.

She came to know this house well over the following decades... first as a young bride, and later, after William's death, as a woman who returned to Savannah again and again, eventually making the Andrew Low House her own home in her later years.

It was here, in this house and in the carriage house just behind it, that Daisy did something that would outlast every cotton fortune this city ever built.

In March of 1912, she gathered seventeen girls in Savannah and registered the very first troops of what she called the Girl Guides.

Within a year, the name changed to something the whole world would come to know:

The Girl Scouts.

This house, and the carriage house behind it, served as their very first headquarters.

Daisy passed away in 1927.

She never really left.

Staff and visitors describe an old rocking chair in the house, a genuine Low family heirloom, that rocks gently on its own with no one near it.

Many believe it is Andrew Low himself, still enjoying the home he built and keeping an eye on his guests the way he always did.

Robert E. Lee's presence is said to linger too.

Visitors have described the sensation, and sometimes the sight, of a figure in formal dress moving through the rooms as though attending a party that ended a century and a half ago.

Tom, Low's longtime butler, is remembered in the sound of footsteps crossing rooms exactly where he used to walk his rounds, tending to a household that no longer needs tending.

And then there is Daisy herself.

Visitors have described the faint scent of perfume drifting through certain rooms with no source, and some claim to have seen an elderly woman resting quietly on a bed upstairs, gone the moment anyone looks twice.

Whether that is truly Juliette Gordon Low, still watching over the house where she built something far bigger than herself, is for you to decide.

What is certain is this.

Every Girl Scout troop meeting somewhere in the world tonight traces its roots back to a room in this very house.

If any spirit had reason to stay close to what she started... it would be hers.