Forsyth Park

Forsyth Park is the largest and most recognizable of Savannah's public spaces, thirty acres of live oaks, Spanish moss, and walking paths that anchor the southern end of the historic district. But it did not arrive all at once, and the things it contains tell the story of how Savannah chose to remember itself through the second half of the nineteenth century.

The northern half of the park was set aside in the eighteen forties on land connected to local scholar William Hodgson. In eighteen fifty-one the city named the park for John Forsyth, a Georgia governor and former United States Secretary of State who had donated the additional southern twenty acres. The park's boundaries were essentially fixed after that, a long rectangle of public green in a city that was running out of room.

The fountain came in eighteen fifty-eight, a cast-iron showpiece modeled on a fountain at the Place de la Concorde in Paris. It arrived as a kit, cast in the North, and was assembled on site at the park's center. Painted white, tiered, with herons and swans and a central female figure, it became the most photographed object in Savannah almost immediately and has stayed that way for a hundred and sixty-some years.

Then came the monument. In eighteen seventy-nine, fourteen years after Appomattox, Savannah dedicated a forty-eight-foot stone shaft topped by a bronze Confederate soldier designed by Canadian sculptor Robert Reid. A second bronze figure, donated by local historian George DeRenne and made by Welsh sculptor David Richards, was added at the base. The monument was the city's formal, public declaration of how it intended to understand the war it had lost. It stands in the park today, as it has for well over a century, in a city still working out what to do with the answer.

The park itself remains one of the great American urban spaces, shaded and unhurried, a place where the city exhales.