Washington Square

This square sits on ground that was already historic before it was ever a square at all.

Long before 1790, when this ground was formally laid out, it was part of the Trustees' Garden... America's very first public experimental garden, planted back in 1733 by Georgia's earliest colonists.

They tried growing everything here.

Grapes for wine, mulberry trees for silk, medicinal plants shipped in from across the world, hoping something would take root and make the young colony profitable.

Most of those experiments failed.

But the ground itself stuck around, and in 1790, the city carved this square out of it, naming it the following year in honor of President George Washington, after his official visit to Savannah in 1791.

By the 1790s, this part of the city had also become home to a wave of new arrivals.

Refugees fleeing revolution in France, and others escaping a violent uprising on the island then called Saint-Domingue... modern-day Haiti... settled in Savannah in these years, rebuilding their lives far from home.

One of them, a Haitian émigré named Simon Mirault, became a well-respected tailor right here in this city.

Names like his rarely make it into the grand histories, but this square, and this neighborhood, was shaped as much by exiles and refugees as it was by generals and governors.

This part of town also sat close to Savannah's busiest, roughest waterfront.

Just down the way stands the Pirates' House, with its own dark legends of shanghaied sailors and tunnels running toward the river... and men who wandered too close to the docks after dark in the 1800s didn't always make it home safely.

Washington Square itself doesn't carry one single, famous ghost story the way some of the squares deeper in the historic district do.

What it carries instead is proximity... to danger, to displacement, to a neighborhood that quietly absorbed wave after wave of people starting over with almost nothing.

Maybe that's exactly why visitors still describe this square differently than some of its neighbors.

Less a specific apparition, more a general unease after dark... footsteps that seem to follow at a distance and then simply stop, a cold current of air moving through the square on still nights, and the occasional, unplaceable feeling of eyes watching from the tree line at the square's edge.

So take a slower walk through Washington Square tonight.

It never had one great tragedy to hang its name on.

It simply held hundreds of smaller ones, quietly, for over two centuries... refugees, sailors, and settlers, all passing through the same patch of ground that once tried, and failed, to grow silk out of the Georgia soil.