Lowcountry

“Moon River,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “Accentuate the Positive” — Savannah native John Herndon Mercer wrote those songs and a thousand more like them, and his songs are some of the most popular of all time. In a career that spanned nearly 50 years, Mercer co-founded Capitol Records, wrote for Broadway musicals, and was nominated for 19 […]

A hurricane with the same destructive force as Katrina hit the Georgia coast on this day in 1893. Known as the “Sea Island Storm,” it killed nearly 2,000 people. The hurricane first hit the coast, passing over Georgia’s Sea Islands, before churning its way north 100 miles with a 16–foot storm surge. The hurricane made […]

A Georgia native founded the most influential black newspaper of the 20th century. Robert Sengstacke Abbott was born on St. Simon’s island in 1868 and raised in Savannah. He attended law school in Chicago. When Abbott couldn’t find a job as a lawyer, he turned to journalism and founded the Chicago Defender. Within a decade […]

“I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.” Thus did U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman notify President Lincoln that he had captured Savannah at the end of his March to the Sea. Sherman left Atlanta […]

The burning of Darien, Georgia, depicted in the Civil War movie, Glory, was one of the most controversial acts of the War. Situated on the Atlantic coast, Darien thrived during the antebellum period as the shipping point for cotton, rice, and lumber. In June 1863, most of Darien’s 500 residents had already fled inland when […]

Fort Pulaski was built by the U.S. Army to protect Savannah from attack, but no one ever dreamed that it would be attacked by the U.S. Army. The fort was built at the mouth of the Savannah River on Cockspur Island. Much of the early work was done by young Lieutenant Robert E. Lee, recently […]

She was partially deaf, suffered from depression, and had no children of her own, yet she founded the Girl Scouts of the USA. Juliette Gordon Low was born into wealth in Savannah in 1860. Two accidents in her 20s left her partially deaf and led to bouts of depression. At 26, Gordon married William Low, […]

It was the first steamship in the world to cross the Atlantic. The steamship Savannah was built in 1818 in New York as a sailing packet but was converted to a steamship after a Savannah shipping firm committed to buy it for transatlantic service. The ship was a 320-ton hybrid, equipped with a steam engine, […]

He was one of the first Georgians to attempt to create a truly color-blind society after the Civil War. Tunis Campbell was born in New Jersey in 1812 to free black parents. Educated at an all-white academy in New York, he joined the abolitionist movement. By the early 1860s Campbell was a married father and […]

She was an outspoken opponent of slavery who married one of the largest slaveholders in the South. Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble was born in London in 1809 in a family of actors, and she became an established actress herself. In Philadelphia in 1832 she met and eventually married Pierce Butler, a Georgia plantation owner with […]