Savannah.
Charleston.
Don’t ever get the idea that visiting one is the same experience as visiting the other. Just to put one name before the other sets you in the midst of a centuries-old rivalry. Charleston is undeniably the elder, founded in 1670, though it would relocate before the turn of that century. Savannah didn’t come along until 1733. Yet both cities proudly claim themselves as the first in America to lay its streets in the modern grid pattern, as opposed to the winding lanes common in European towns.
Sure, both started as outposts in what would become the original 13 colonies. Both were firebrands of rebellion, first against the British during the Revolutionary War, then against the Union during the War Between the States.
Both are Atlantic ports that have outlived pirates, slave trading, epidemics, earthquakes, fires and hurricanes to welcome vacationers today with charming historic districts, fine restaurants, boutique shopping and an almost endless choice of ghost tours.
Charleston.
Savannah.
Each has the warmest hospitality, the laziest carriage rides, the refreshing-est sweet tea, the award-winning-est historic inns, the haute-est Lowcountry cuisine. Each is the most haunted. But that doesn’t mean they’re alike, not by a long shot. There’s more separating Savannah, Ga., and Charleston, S.C., than a state line and the hundred or so miles between them.
Here’s to the differences that make each city the only star in its heaven.
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2 CITIES BY THE SEA
SAVANNAH: Flowers, fountains and even some ghosts, all wrapped up in Spanish moss
By Toni Salama, Special to the Tribune
SAVANNAH, GA. — With due respect to Savannah’s hospitality and history, the one feature that really makes Savannah, Savannah is the presence of its monumental live oaks hung with Spanish moss. Everything about Georgia’s first township takes place within their framework.
Just try to imagine the city without them. You can’t. They shade every building, grace every square and figure in the city’s contribution to American folk sayings. “Good night, sleep tight and don’t let the bed bugs bite” originated here, say Savannah’s wags, when settlers stuffed their mattresses with the moss, only to learn the hard way that it was full of chiggers.
They also say that colonial Georgia started out with four no-nos: no rum, no lawyers, no Catholics and no slaves. But it didn’t take long for those prohibitions to fall by the wayside.
Held some four years by the British during the Revolutionary War, Savannah was famously spared less than a century later during the Civil War. The Confederate city’s beauty so moved Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman that, rather than putting it to the torch, he instead made a Christmas present of it in 1864 to President Lincoln — or Mrs. Lincoln, depending, on who’s telling the story.
Much of that beauty is still preserved in what is now one of the country’s largest National Historic Landmarks. Twenty-one of the city’s original 24 squares — set with fountains or statues or park benches or banks of azaleas — are spaced every couple of blocks, making strolling here a delightful walk of discovery. Even the sound of carriage rides is different here, muted, because the horses are shod with rubber shoes instead of iron.
Boo! Y’all
Cynics have smirked that Savannah never had a “ghost problem” until recent years, when the living found a way to turn hauntings into a cottage industry of guided tours. Believers, in contrast, trace the city’s supernatural history back at least as far as the slave trade, when Africans painted ceilings, doors, window frames and porches “haint” blue to keep evil spirits at bay.
I’m not sure I’d go as far as the American Institute of Parapsychology in naming Savannah America’s Most Haunted City. But I confess that I experienced a certain manifestation during a ghost tour. Entities seemed to be sitting in rocking chairs on a second-story porch. As our group walked beneath them in the twilight, one raised a Georgia accent in greeting: “Boo! Y’all. We’re not really here. Just pretend you didn’t see us.” Its fellow ghosts giggled and kept on rocking.
Hey! Y’all
Speaking of cottage industries, Savannah’s celebrity chef Paula Deen is one in and of herself. Her rags-to-riches story as a restaurateur and TV personality have fans crowding narrow West Congress (between Whitaker and Bernard) throughout the day to make, and then keep, reservations at The Lady & Sons restaurant. When it’s time to eat, hosts address everyone with a hearty “Hey! Y’all,” Deen’s own signature greeting, and start yelling names to be seated. If the process seems rather like a cattle call, the meal more than makes up for the humiliation. You can order from the menu if you want, but don’t make the mistake of automatically avoiding the buffet. Fried chicken and mashed potatoes never came so close to heaven as they do here.
Cocktails, anyone?
Remember how I said that Gen. Sherman was moved by the city’s beauty to spare it from the torch? Well, maybe that’s true. Or maybe the version about the persuasiveness of certain ladies — a story I’ll not repeat here — is true. But personally, I think a strong argument can be made that Chatham Artillery Punch did the trick. Just look at this recipe:
Between 36 and 48 hours before serving, mix
1 1/2 gallons Catawba wine
1/2 gallon rum
1 1/2 quarts rye whiskey
1 quart gin
1 quart brandy
1/2 pint Benedictine
1 1/2 gallons strong tea
1 1/2 quarts orange juice
1 1/2 quarts lemon juice
2 quarts Maraschino cherries
2 1/2 pounds brown sugar
When ready to serve, add a case of Champagne.
Serves 50
Now, the Chatham Artillery is the oldest known military organization in Georgia and was several years established when in 1791 it welcomed President Washington to town with a 26-gun salute. But me, I’m perfectly willing to entertain the idea that it was the punch as much as the salute that impressed the Founding Father enough to gift the outfit with two cannons captured from the British at Yorktown.
These so-called Washington Guns are sheltered on East Bay Street. And, thanks to Savannah’s booze-on-foot policy, you can buy a generous cup of Chatham Artillery Punch for $10 at River House Seafood & Bakery down on River Street, carry it with you up the levee to Factors Walk and toast the guns, President Washington, the Artillery, Savannah itself or anything else that comes to mind. Pirates, even.
Booty call
Savannah in the 1700s was flush with pirates, and some folks swear it still is. Tour guides attest that there’s something evil upstairs at East Broad and Bay in The Pirates’ House. The spot is a popular tourist restaurant and ghost-tour stop today. But the place really was a pirate hangout almost from the time it opened for business as an inn and tavern in 1753. This odd assortment of rooms with shiplike plank walls, stone floors and mysterious shafts and stairways leading down to no telling what, nevertheless serves a mean Reuben sandwich with a side of potato salad and iced tea for $12. Kids can help themselves to the goodies in the pirate’s chest.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” is all the richer for having drawn upon this place as the setting of pirate Capt. Flint’s death. Fiction or not, the captain — or something — is said to still haunt the upper floor.
Buried treasure
A good number of ghost tours start from the entrance to Colonial Park Cemetery at the corner of Oglethorpe and Abercorn. Because it’s in the Historic District, it often is thronged with visitors. Unfortunately, occupations by British, and later Union, troops on the site took their toll. The story goes that soldiers took shelter in the crypts and entertained themselves by using tombstones for target practice. Many headstones have been mounted on the far wall of the cemetery because no one knew which plot they belonged to.
The cemetery you really want to visit is Bonaventure Cemetery, about 31/2 miles from downtown, where East 36th Street meets Bonaventure Road. Some of the nation’s most memorable funerary sculptures keep vigil above the graves in the older part of Bonaventure. Life-sized marble maidens, wreaths in hand, drape wistfully across the tombstones. Stone angels bow their heads in sorrow or else raise arms and wings in victory. Lyricist Johnny Mercer is buried here. So is a 6-year-old girl, Gracie Watson, beneath her own life-sized likeness in her Easter best.
Battle cry
You’ll have to drive east out of town, out toward Tybee Island, for Savannah’s most salient reminder of the Civil War. Ft. Pulaski, now a National Monument, was considered impregnable until Union bombardment breached the walls and forced a Confederate surrender in 1862. The restored fort still stands on Cockspur Island and is still surrounded by a moat where alligators doze. Its magazines are empty now, its ramparts walked only by history buffs. But it’s not a silent place. Civil War re-enactors — this day dressed in Blue, that day dressed in Gray — present and fire arms as part of one history talk. Other “enlisted” men set off a cannon in a different demonstration. How anyone in those days survived battle with their hearing intact, I can only imagine. It was all I could do to pick out the strains of the banjo and fiddle players who’d arrived in costume to lend a bit of historic culture to the scene.
And then some
Of course, there’s so much more to Savannah than this. Historic tour homes, romantic inns, fine restaurants, famous statues, movie locations, walking tours of every ilk and a host of enterprises given over to the enduring popularity of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”
But I wanted to tell you the things about Savannah that caught my fancy, that made me want to plan another trip there. You can learn more about its other charms at www.savannahvisit.com.
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CHARLESTON: Have a planters punch, but don’t expect to get a ‘thanks, y’all’
By Toni Salama, Special to the Tribune
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Charlestonians are a fascinating folk. Hospitable, genteel, tolerant, reserved … and possessed of a fire in the belly for rebellion, if the town’s history is any indication.
In one spot alone, where the Old Exchange & Provost Dungeon stands, British tea was commandeered and stored, South Carolina elected its delegates to the First Continental Congress, and in 1776 papers were drawn up that made South Carolina the first of the American colonies to declare independence from Britain. It was Charleston’s native son Christopher Gadsden, the Revolutionary War general, who designed the famous “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.
Not a century later, Charleston would give birth to the Ordinance of Secession, making South Carolina the first state to secede from the Union. And the first shots of the Civil War were fired offshore here in 1861, when Confederate forces took Ft. Sumter.
But the proud city that welcomed President Washington with the peal of church bells and a 15-gun salute from the Charleston Artillery Battalion, and feted him with a series of glittering balls, would become such a desolation during the Civil War that Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, rather than assaulting the city, directed his forces elsewhere, saying, “Anyone who is not satisfied with war should go and see Charleston, and he will pray louder and deeper than ever that the country may in the long future be spared any more war.”
By the Roaring ’20s the town had resurrected to give the world an energetic new song and dance, the Charleston. But nowadays, the jazziest feature of the city may well be the wide, shaded porch swings they’ve installed on a pier that reaches into the Cooper River from Waterfront Park. Everyone seems to wind up here, unless they’re jogging along the rainbow row of homes fronting the azalea-hedged Battery, where the town once hung its pirates
Boo who?
Downtown Charleston, wedged between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, has no cemeteries. It has graveyards, the distinction being that cemeteries are independent properties and graveyards are attached to churches, as any decent ghost-tour guide will tell you. Tours on foot lead through haunted alleys and past places where, according to the tour I was on, orb-like lights have appeared … in photographs, at least.
It’s said that in the graveyard of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, a female spirit sometimes appears to weep at the grave of her child. But the church doesn’t see things that way. By the iron fence that separates the graveyard from the sidewalk, a sign reads: “The only ghost at St. Philip’s is the Holy Ghost.”
There are plenty of other graveyards to explore here, for Charleston has so many houses of worship that it’s nicknamed the Holy City.
No, y’all
Charleston is blessed with an unfair advantage of Lowcountry and fine dining. It’s hard to narrow the field. But on Queen Street is a restaurant that became my fast favorite: 82 Queen. Breeze through the bar and you’ll be rewarded with al fresco tables in a garden where the backs of white wrought-iron chairs are shaped like butterflies. The atmosphere is reason enough to come, but you won’t be disappointed by the $12 chicken special with iced tea. What may disappoint you is that no one here, or at any of the other restaurants I tried, says “y’all.” They tell me that’s because the town has experienced an influx of people from Up North who’ve helped restore the city’s buildings but haven’t taken up the Southern lingo.
Cocktails, anyone?
Most places in town can pour Charleston’s signature drink, planters punch. But they’re friendlier about it at Magnolia’s, 185 E. Bay St., than they are at Peninsula Grill, 112 N. Market St., in whose hotel the drink is supposed to have been invented. The Peninsula Grill’s bartender wasn’t forthcoming with the recipe, but most places mix it with dark rum, orange juice, pineapple juice and grenadine and serve it on the rocks for $7-$8.
I’m 99 percent certain that this is neither the drink Charlestonians have saluted George Washington with, nor the one he’d have raised when he returned the toast to “the city of Charleston, and prosperity to it.” The nearest I can tell, they were drinking Madeira at the time, catered by Williams’ Coffee House at 6 shillings a bottle.
Booty call
What went on upstairs in the Old Exchange building were only the proudest of Charleston’s events. The seamier side was taken care of downstairs in the Provost Dungeon. Among the famous imprisoned on this site was Stede Bonnet, called the “Gentleman Pirate” because he didn’t steal his first ship. That didn’t keep them from locking him up, though, in the Court of Guard that stood here in 1718, or hanging him later. The place caters to kids now, with an animatronic town elder lecturing about the pirate mannequins still jailed here.
But all that’s treasure isn’t necessarily gold. In 1995 Clive Cussler found the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley, sunk off Sullivan’s Island. It’s been raised, and you can see it on weekends at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center, 1250 Supply St.
Varied treasures
Not far out of town, Charleston’s plantations compete for tourists now much as they surely must have competed for commerce in their heyday. Each offers a different experience.
If you go north out of Charleston toward Myrtle Beach, you’ll come to Boone Hall Plantation, 1235 Long Point Rd. in Mt. Pleasant. It’s the one approached by a long drive through a tunnel of moss-draped trees. The place bills itself as America’s oldest working plantation, and its Gullah Theatre gives performances and presentations of African, or Geechee-Gullah, culture.
Head inland from Charleston on Ashley River Road, and you’ll discover three in a row. Drayton Hall, at 3380 Ashley River Rd., is memorable as the oldest surviving example of Georgian Palladian architecture in the United States. Building began in 1738, meaning that this building is not only antebellum, it’s pre-Revolutionary. Its rooms have deliberately been left vacant — a powerful experience — so visitors can see the house itself, its carved plaster ceilings and dentil crown molding without distraction. Take the marsh walk around the grounds to see this mansion reflected in a pond framed by moss-draped oaks. Aside from the house tour, there’s a lecture on the life of slaves and their cultural contributions to Lowcountry life.
Next door, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens claims to be the oldest plantation on the Ashley River and is beloved for its gardens and small zoo. It’s so large, some people tour its grounds by boat or tram.
Third is Middleton Place, on whose grounds stand the nation’s oldest landscaped gardens. Craft demonstrations in the out buildings and carriage rides are part of each day’s line-up. But the best view of the grounds may be from the windows in its restaurant, which overlooks a shaded glen.
Battle cry
You’ll have to catch a boat to get out to island-bound Ft. Sumter, where the differences between North and South burst into fire. Boats leave from either side of Charleston Harbor: from downtown Charleston near the South Carolina Aquarium, and from Mt. Pleasant’s Patriot’s Point, near the USS Yorktown.
Visiting Ft. Sumter isn’t about seeing the fort itself. There are many other coastal forts in better shape, and this one wouldn’t be worth the trip or the $15 admission except to see and hear how it was possible for the Confederacy to take, and then lose, this strategic island.
Some local tour guides go so far as to recommend skipping Ft. Sumter and visiting Ft. Moultrie instead. Located south of Mt. Pleasant, Ft. Moultrie was a Revolutionary War fort that withstood British shells because it was built of palmetto logs; bombs bounced right off of the spongy material, thus earning the palm tree-like palmetto a place on South Carolina’s state flag.
And then some
Of course, there’s so much more to Charleston than this. Historic tour homes, romantic inns, fine restaurants, Revolutionary and Civil War sites, The South Carolina Aquarium, scenic and walking tours of every description — especially ghost tours.
But I wanted to tell you the things about Charleston that stood out in my mind, that made me want to plan another trip there. You can learn more about its other charms at www.charlestoncvb.com.
