Factors Walk

Look at the ground beneath you.

Iron bridges, cobblestone ramps, brick warehouses stacked against the bluff... this stretch above the river is called Factors Walk, and it was built for one purpose.

Cotton.

In the early to mid-1800s, cotton was the wealth of the South, and this was where that wealth was weighed, priced, and shipped out to the world.

The men who worked here were called factors... brokers who walked these iron catwalks between warehouse offices, deciding what a bale of cotton from a Georgia plantation was worth on a market half a world away.

Savannah, for a time, ran one of the largest cotton exchanges in America, and this row of buildings above the river was its engine room.

But cotton wasn't the only commodity that moved through this district.

And I want to speak plainly about what else happened here, because this ground deserves that honesty more than it deserves a good scare.

Beneath these warehouses run tunnels... built originally to move goods quickly from the ships on the river up to the buildings above without clogging the streets.

But in the era of the domestic slave trade, those same tunnels and the buildings above them were also used to move and hold human beings.

Men, women, and children... forcibly brought here and kept in these passages and warehouses while awaiting sale.

Later, during Savannah's yellow fever epidemics, some of those same underground spaces were pressed into service as makeshift morgues, when the dead came faster than the living could bury them.

This is not folklore.

It is the documented, often unspoken history of this stretch of riverfront, and it is worth remembering plainly, without embellishment, exactly as it happened.

Perhaps because of that weight, people who walk this district after dark... especially those who step into the surviving tunnel passages... describe things they struggle to explain.

A tall, shadowed figure has been reported standing motionless near the walkways, gone in an instant and leaving behind a rush of cold air.

Others describe the unmistakable feeling of being watched from the dark mouth of a tunnel, though no one is there.

Some visitors report hearing voices layered together... men, women, and children... echoing from somewhere deeper inside the passages than any sound should be able to travel.

Distant moaning has also been reported near several tunnel entrances along this walk, especially late at night, when the crowds above have gone quiet.

Whether that is grief pressed into the stone itself, or simply an old, dark space doing what old, dark spaces do to the imagination... is not for me to say.

What is certain is this.

Factors Walk was built on real fortunes, made from real cotton, moved by real hands... some free, and many not.

Walk it with that in mind tonight.

Some ground remembers more than we'd like it to.