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The Hostess City That Beauty Saved — and the Whole Truth About the City Beneath the Moss

There’s a city in Georgia where the trees drip with Spanish moss, where the dead are literally buried beneath the sidewalks you walk on, where a box of chocolates made a movie immortal, and where every March, thousands of people turn green.

It has been burned, flooded, occupied, surrendered, and saved more times than almost any other city in America. And somehow, every single time, it came back more beautiful.

Photo courtesy of Mandy Matney

In this episode of Wherever It Leads…, Mandy Matney and David Moses take you deep into Savannah, Georgia — the Hostess City. David lived there for nearly a decade, worked in the city’s tourism industry, and has a little plot of land at Bonaventure Cemetery where he might spend some time after this life is through. Mandy and David now live just up the coast in Hilton Head, South Carolina, which means Savannah is practically in their backyard — and a city they’ve been visiting, falling in love with (and in), for years.

This is not the ghost tour version. This is Savannah fully exposed.

“Savannah is big enough to be a city, but small enough that it can feel like it was built just for you.”

— David Moses

The Founding Vision That Was Radical — and Contradictory

Before there were squares and Spanish moss, there was James Oglethorpe — a British social reformer who arrived at a high bluff above the Savannah River in 1733 with colonists who weren’t wealthy landowners but artisans, tradespeople, and religious refugees from across Europe. His founding principles sound radical even today: no lawyers, no slavery, no liquor. He laid out America’s first planned city — a grid of wards, each centered around an open public square. Twenty-two still exist today, and they remain the soul of the city.

And yet — Oglethorpe brought cotton seeds with him from England. They thrived. Within seventeen years of Savannah’s founding, Georgia had become a slave-holding colony. The man who wanted to build a classless society helped construct one of the most brutal systems of exploitation in human history. Contradictions baked in from the very start.

James Oglethorpe

Photo from Georgia Historical Society

Yellow Fever and the City That Learned to Live With Death

Savannah was built in a swamp — a gorgeous, moss-draped, mosquito-breeding swamp. And before anyone connected mosquitoes to disease, that was a slow-moving catastrophe waiting to happen. The city suffered repeated yellow fever epidemics throughout the 19th century, with the worst killing hundreds in a single outbreak. The city’s leadership downplayed the epidemic for weeks to protect its status as a major cotton port. Prioritizing economic optics over public health. In 1820. Sound familiar?

Those people are still here, in a very literal sense. Savannah has one of the most hauntingly magnificent cemeteries in America — Bonaventure, draped in live oaks and Spanish moss overlooking the tidal marsh — but people are also buried in the squares, under the streets, beneath the parks. Which might explain why ghost tourism is basically its own industry.

A Young Man Who Fought for Two Revolutions

The Battle of Savannah, 1779 — one of the bloodiest single days of the entire Revolutionary War — included a multinational fighting force unlike anything else in that conflict. Among the French-allied soldiers was a young man named Henri Christophe, fighting as part of the free men of color. He survived the battle, returned to the Caribbean, and became King Henri the First of Haiti — one of the founding fathers of the only nation in world history established through a successful slave revolt. There is a monument in Savannah’s Franklin Square today honoring those Haitian soldiers. History is astonishing.

Sherman’s Christmas Gift

On December 22, 1864, after cutting a scorched-earth path forty miles wide across Georgia, General Sherman reached Savannah. Confederate forces had evacuated overnight. The mayor rode out, surrendered peacefully, and Sherman — struck by the beauty of the squares — chose to preserve the city rather than sack it. He sent a telegram to President Lincoln that has become one of the most famous messages in American history: “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah.” It stands today essentially as it looked in 1864. A city saved by its own beauty.

General Sherman’s telegram to President Lincoln

Photo from the National Archives

Seven Stubborn Women Who Saved It Again

In 1955, downtown Savannah was in bad shape — blighted buildings, residents fleeing south, and a city government with a simple solution: parking lots. A funeral home had its eye on the Isaiah Davenport House on Columbia Square, a stunning 1820 Federal-style mansion, and planned to tear it down for a surface lot.

Photo from the Historic Savannah Foundation

That’s when a reporter named Anna Colquitt Hunter got on the phone. She called six friends — Lucy Barrow McIntire, Elinor Adler Dillard, Nola McEvoy Roos, Jane Adair Wright, Katherine Judkins Clark, and Dorothy Ripley Roebling. Seven women. They pooled their connections and $22,500, bought the Davenport House, and blocked the demolition. Then they formed the Historic Savannah Foundation — an organization that has since saved over 420 historic properties across the city.

Savannah’s squares, its townhouses, its gas-lit alleyways — they exist because seven women in 1955 said not the parking lot. In September 2025, a permanent monument to those seven women was unveiled at Columbia Square, believed to be the first monument to women in the preservation movement anywhere in the country. You can visit it today. You absolutely should.

“I love to tell people Savannah is the gorgeous, gritty, magical city it is today because of women who fought to protect it from being run down by developers who would have made it look like every other city in America.”

— Mandy Matney

The Gullah Geechee: The Roots Beneath the Roots

The culture that is foundational to what Savannah truly is gets overlooked far too easily in the antebellum-architecture narrative. The Gullah Geechee are the descendants of enslaved West Africans brought to the coastal Lowcountry. Because of the geographic isolation of the Sea Islands, they were able to preserve their own Creole language, spiritual traditions, cuisine, and artistic practices — African cultural elements that were systematically erased almost everywhere else in America. Savannah sits at the heart of that territory. This history deserves your time and your dollars.

St. Patrick’s Day: Not Just a Party

Savannah hosts one of the nation’s largest and oldest St. Patrick’s Day celebrations — and the Irish roots here are not decorative. They are real and deep. Irish immigrants flooded the city after the great fire of 1820. During the Great Famine of the 1840s, Savannah’s port was a primary point of entry for Irish families fleeing starvation. The Hibernian Society, founded in 1812, has organized the parade since it began in 1824. For many Savannahians, St. Patrick’s Day is the most important day of the year. It feels like the whole city takes a collective breath and decides, for one day, to be entirely, joyfully, unabashedly alive.

Tara Reese: The Insider’s View

Then we sit down with Tara Reese — Savannah local, cultural insider, Chamber of Commerce leader, and host of the Savannah Irish Podcast — for a conversation about what this city really feels like from the inside. From the “running of the squares” at 6am on parade day, to why Savannah calls them visitors and not tourists, to the Tourism Leadership Council that honors the dishwashers and housekeepers who make every great stay possible — Tara brings the kind of ground-level knowledge that no travel guide can match.

The Hard Truths

We don’t look away from Savannah’s challenges. The city’s crime rate runs considerably higher than the national average, concentrated in neighborhoods that are rarely discussed in travel writing. Gentrification is accelerating near the expanding Historic District and SCAD campuses, displacing long-term residents — particularly in historically Black communities — who can’t afford to live in the city they serve. Tourism brings enormous revenue; the distribution of that revenue is deeply uneven. And local accountability journalism, like in many mid-sized Southern cities, remains under-resourced. Wherever It Leads covers all of it.

Additional Resources:

This is the kind of episode you’ll want to share — with the friend who loves history, the travel buddy who’s always looking for the next trip, and anyone who thinks they already know what Savannah is. They don’t. Not yet.

Come find us at whereveritleadspod.com and hit play. Savannah is waiting.