Wright Square

This square is one of the oldest in Savannah, laid out in 1733, the same year this whole city was founded.

They called it Percival Square at first, and later renamed it for James Wright, Georgia's last royal governor.

But long before either name mattered much, this ground already held someone important.

Beneath these oaks lies Tomochichi, the Yamacraw chief who befriended General Oglethorpe and helped make Savannah's founding possible at all.

When Tomochichi died in 1739, Oglethorpe had him buried right here, at the center of the square, with full military honors... a mark of genuine respect, in a colony that didn't always extend that respect easily.

I'll tell you honestly, though... his original monument didn't survive the century.

In the 1880s, it was taken down to make room for a monument honoring a local railroad founder instead.

It took until 1899, and the determined effort of one Savannah woman, before a proper monument to Tomochichi was finally restored to this square.

He's still here.

It simply took the city over a hundred years to remember to say so properly.

Wright Square holds an older, harder story too... one that belongs to this ground as much as any monument does.

In January of 1735, a young Irish indentured servant named Alice Riley was brought to this square and publicly hanged.

She and a fellow servant, Richard White, had been convicted of killing the man who held both their contracts... a master who, by the accounts that survive, subjected Alice to sustained abuse.

She was pregnant at the time of her sentencing, and colonial law delayed her execution until after she gave birth to her son.

Weeks after Alice was hanged, that child died as well.

Alice Riley is remembered as the first woman ever executed in the colony of Georgia.

I want to be careful with this story, because so much has been added to it over the centuries that separating the documented facts from the embellishment isn't always possible anymore... even the exact location of her execution within this square isn't settled history.

But the core of it, a young woman's suffering, a public hanging, and an infant who didn't survive his mother by more than a few weeks, is not invention.

That happened.

On this ground, or very near it.

Perhaps that's why, for generations, Savannah mothers were said to steer their children away from this square after dark.

Visitors and locals alike describe a woman in old, plain dress, moving slowly beneath these oaks as though searching for something she's lost.

Some report the faint sound of a lullaby, or soft weeping, carried on the air with no source.

The story holds that Alice is still looking for the child taken from her in her final days... and that she has never stopped.

Walk through Wright Square gently tonight.

It has held a chief's grave, moved without his family's consent, and a mother's grief that has outlasted three centuries.

Some ground simply remembers longer than we'd like it to.