Savannah Travel
Out from Savannah
Tybee Island , eighteen miles east of the city on US-80, is served by three daily C&H buses (tel 912/232-7099) from the Civic Center in Savannah. Here you'll find Savannah's best and not too overdeveloped beach , as well as a 154ft lighthouse, at 30 Meddin Drive, dating from 1736, and a small museum housed in a nearby gun battery (summer daily except Tues 9am5.30pm; rest of year Mon & WedFri noon4pm, Sat & Sun 10am4pm; $4). To get there take a left turn just before the beach. For great Low Country food , head for The Crab Shack , at 40 Estill Hammock Rd, Chimney Creek (tel 912/786-9857), where you can dine on delicious crabs and shrimp in an old shack by the creek worth a visit if you can find it. Take a right turn off the main road to the beach, about two miles before you reach the lighthouse turnoff. Spanky's Beachside at 1605 Strand Ave (tel 912/786-5520) has live music at weekends.
FORT PULASKI NATIONAL MONUMENT , off US-80 E en route to Tybee Island, is the most interesting of several local forts (daily 8.30am6.45pm; $2). An impressive Confederate stronghold, set on its own idyllic if rather buggy little island and ringed by a moat inhabited by the occasional alligator, it was nevertheless taken by Union troops, the first masonry fortress to be pierced by rifled cannon fire.
Ten miles south of Savannah at 7601 Skidaway Rd, Wormsloe State Historic Site (TuesSat 9am5pm, Sun 25.30pm; $3; tel 912/353-3023) is the site of an eighteenth-century defensive plantation. The atmospheric tabby ruins of the fortified house of British settler Noble Jones are now overgrown with palms and lush forest. Inside the house, a museum covers the early settlement of Savannah, with archeological finds and demonstrations of the skills and crafts of the first settlers. Much of the Georgia coast is taken up by a string of National Wildlife Refuges , on the small marshy islands that make up the barrier island chain . It's well worth detouring or backtracking along the quiet side roads to cross to Blackbeard Island, Wolf Island, Pinckney or Wassaw , where tranquil swamps are filled with nesting birds and offer great fishing.
Savannah
American towns don't come much nicer than SAVANNAH , seventeen miles up the Savannah River from the ocean, on the border with South Carolina. The appealing Historic District , ranged around Spanish-moss-swathed squares, formed the core of the original city, and today boasts examples of just about every architectural style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the atmospheric cobbled waterfront on the Savannah River , key to the postwar economy, is edged by towering old cotton warehouses.
Savannah was founded in 1733 by James Oglethorpe as the first settlement of the new British colony of Georgia. His intention was to establish a haven for debtors, with no Catholics, lawyers or hard liquor, and above all, no slaves. However, with the arrival of North Carolinan settlers in the 1750s, the town became a major export center, at the end of important railroad lines by which cotton was funneled from far away in the South. Sherman arrived here in December 1864 at the end of his March to the Sea; he offered the town to Abraham Lincoln as a Christmas gift, but at Lincoln's urging left it intact and set to work apportioning land to freed slaves. This was the first recognition of the need for ''reconstruction,'' though such concrete economic provision was rarely to occur again.
The plantations floundered after the Civil War; cotton prices slumped, and Savannah went into decline. There was little industry beyond the port, and as that fell into disuse and decay, so too did Savannah's graceful townhouses and tree-lined boulevards. Not until the 1960s did local citizens start to organize what has been, on the whole, the successful restoration of their town recently, and tentatively, extended to the predominantly Victorian District .
Savannah has acquired a new notoriety of late thanks to its starring role in John Berendt's best-selling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil ; For a sense of what goes on behind closed doors in the city, it's an unbeatable read, and locals delight in making dark hints as to how much they knew, or even did, themselves. If you want to look behind the closed doors for yourself, however, few locations in ''The Book'' as it's universally known are open to the public, and none is likely to satisfy your curiosity.