Forsyth Park

By day, this is the most photographed park in Savannah.

Families on picnic blankets, joggers circling the fountain, the click of a hundred cameras aimed at that same white spray of water.

But this ground has held far more than picnics.

That fountain was installed in 1858, ordered, believe it or not, straight out of a catalog... a design so popular it has near-identical twins standing in parks from New York to Peru.

It's become the single most recognizable image of this entire city.

But walk the wide lawns around it, and you're walking ground that spent the years just after that fountain went up... training soldiers, not tourists.

In the years leading into the Civil War, and throughout it, Forsyth Park's open fields served as a drilling ground and encampment.

Confederate troops mustered and trained here first.

Then, after Sherman's forces took Savannah in December of 1864, Union soldiers occupied these same lawns.

In 1875, the Savannah Ladies Memorial Association dedicated a forty-eight-foot monument here to the Confederate dead, a somber, formal centerpiece that still stands at the park's southern end today, flanked by the bronze likenesses of two Confederate generals.

Some who walk this park after dark report figures in old-fashioned military dress, standing motionless near that monument, as though still keeping watch over a war that ended more than a century and a half ago.

There's another story tied to this park, one worth hearing with a healthy amount of skepticism attached.

Just across the way stands the old Candler Hospital, one of the oldest hospitals in Georgia, which was overwhelmed during Savannah's last major yellow fever epidemic in 1876... over a thousand people died from that outbreak alone.

Local legend holds that a tunnel once ran from the hospital directly beneath Forsyth Park, used to move the bodies of fever victims out of sight without alarming the living.

I'll be honest with you... no verified record confirms that tunnel ever existed exactly as the story describes.

It's the kind of tale that gets repeated so often on ghost tours that it starts to feel like documented fact, when really, it remains folklore.

What is documented is the epidemic itself, and the staggering number of dead this city had to find some way to bury quickly.

Even the elegant mansion overlooking the park's northern edge carries its own quiet history.

For over fifty years, the building now known as the Mansion on Forsyth Park operated as a funeral home, its rooms once filled not with hotel guests, but with Savannah families come to grieve.

So the next time you're strolling past that fountain on a bright afternoon, remember what this park has also been... a drilling ground, a memorial, and if the old stories are even half true, a resting place for more of this city's dead than any single plaque could ever properly account for.