Taylor Square

This square carries a name today that it didn't always have, and the story of why matters as much as anything else you'll hear tonight.

Laid out in 1851, this square was known for well over a century and a half as Calhoun Square, named for the South Carolina statesman and vocal defender of slavery.

In 2023, Savannah's city council voted to rename it.

It's now called Taylor Square, in honor of Susie King Taylor... a woman born into slavery in Georgia who went on to become an educator, a memoirist, and the first Black nurse to serve in the United States Civil War.

It was the first of this city's historic squares ever named for a Black person, or for a woman.

That renaming didn't happen in a vacuum.

It happened because of what this ground was quietly found to be holding.

Between 1763 and 1851, city law set aside specific ground in Savannah for the burial of enslaved and free Black residents... officially, the land beneath what's now Whitefield Square, a few blocks from here.

But those burial grounds were never clearly marked or fenced with any permanence, and over the decades, burials spread well beyond their official boundary.

In 2004, utility workers digging near this square's southeast corner, only a few feet down, uncovered a human skull.

Further work confirmed what historians had long suspected... an unmarked burial ground for Black Savannahians lies beneath this square as well, its true boundaries still not fully known, its occupants still largely unnamed.

I tell you this plainly, because it deserves to be told plainly.

This isn't ghost-tour embellishment.

It's documented local history, uncovered by accident, that reshaped how this city understands the ground its squares are built on.

Perhaps knowing that, it's less surprising that so many people describe an unusual heaviness when crossing this square after dark... a sense of being watched, a chill that has nothing to do with the weather, footsteps that seem to trail behind you and vanish the moment you turn around.

The square is also home to one of Savannah's most talked-about haunted addresses, 432 Abercorn Street.

Its ghost stories have grown elaborate and dark over the years, including one especially disturbing tale of a child's mistreatment inside its walls.

I want to be honest with you about that story specifically... investigators and historians have found no reliable record supporting it, and much of what circulates appears to be invented or heavily exaggerated well after the fact.

The house's genuine, older history is interesting enough on its own without it.

What isn't invented, and what deserves your attention far more, is the ground beneath your own feet right now.

So walk this square slowly tonight.

It was renamed for a reason, and what's remembered here matters more than what merely haunts it.