Day 6: Savannah to Hilton Head Island

After a second night in Savannah, it was the day to depart for Hilton Head Island, across the South Carolina border. But we weren’t quite ready to depart Georgia entirely. We still had a few places to visit outside the city.

I like to take morning runs, and I decided to take a few photos along my route (which went from the Marshall House hotel to the edge of Forsythe Park and back). Along the way I saw the Mercer Williams House (made famous by the book and movie ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’), Monterey Square (which is across the street from the Mercer House), and the Sorrel-Weed House which was built in the early 1800s and was the home of a Confederate General named Francis Sorrell.

The Sorrell-Weed house is among the many supposedly haunted houses of Savannah owing to its history. Supposedly the house is haunted by Sorrell’s second wife Matilda who jumped to her death from the second floor of neighboring house, or the slave girl Molly with whom Sorrell may have been having an affair, and who may have hung herself in the carriage house.

After returning to the hotel we packed up and reclaimed the car from valet parking. The valet attendant was much more helpful than our experience on arrival and we tipped him according.

At this point I was enjoying Savannah much more and I do think we will be back again in the future, and we certainly have a lot more to see and do in Georgia in the coming years.

Bonaventure Cemetery

The first planned stop was the actual ‘Garden of Good and Evil’: Bonaventure Cemetery. Truthfully, it is a bit odd to go on vacation and spend time visiting cemeteries. Its not as if we knew any of the deceased personally.

But Bonaventure is a tourist attraction owing to the historic statues at many of the grave sites, the moss-covered oaks that often drip with rain water, and the aforementioned book. Unfortunately the Bird Girl statue from the book cover is no longer in the cemetery. It was moved to the Telfair Museum in Savannah.

We did see a number of interesting statues, however, after realizing that we were in the wrong section and not in the ‘old’ cemetery. The Corinne Lawton grave and the Gracie Watson grave are among the statues pictured below. I’ve linked to their tragic stories.

While I don’t know how much of this is myth and how much is reality, grave sites like Gracie’s have to be protected from people attempting to chip away from them and some of it is part of voodoo practices. This was one reason the Bird Girl statue was removed from the cemetery. At any rate, it’s a rather mysterious place but one that must be respected.

Tybee Island Light Station

After spending some time at the cemetery it was time for something a little less somber. We drove onward to Tybee Island to visit the Light Station.

As I mentioned in the prior post, it was a rather cold day for Georgia in October, with a brisk wind and temperatures in the high 50s on Tybee Island. Normally I would have included a stop at Tybee Island Beach, but the weather and surf conditions were not conducive to doing so.

We ascended to the top of the lighthouse (as you can see if the photos and videos), and Shelley and Evan (and I as well) took some time learning to tie some mariner’s knots.

We learned from watching a movie in the visitor’s center that the lighthouse dates back to the early 1700s, but originally it wasn’t a lighthouse at all. It was a ‘daymark’, which provided a visual marker for a location. The first lighthouse at the current location was built in 1790. Just before the Civil War the first fresnel lens was mounted on the lighthouse, but this structure was destroyed by the Confederates who viewed it as an aid to the Union navy.

After the Civil War the current structure was built along with the accompanying head keepers cottages. The head keeper’s cottage is actually a pretty nice house, in our opinion. Plenty of room, and let’s face it, there are worse places to be a head keeper than Tybee Island, Georgia.

Fort Pulaski

Just a short drive from Tybee Island is the Civil War-era Fort Pulaski. It was our next stop of the day.

We’ve been to a lot of forts over the years. I don’t know if I could even enumerate them all. But I think Fort Pulaski is one of the most interesting of them all.

Fort Pulaski was an American fort that was captured by the Confederate Army at the outset of the Civil War. The fortress was believed to be essentially impregnable, to the point that Robert E. Lee told the commanding officer at the fort that the Union guns on Tybee Island could not penetrate the walls.

However, Lee was wrong. The Union army had begun to use new rifled artillery. Using these rifled canons they managed to breach the outer wall, forcing the Confederate commander Olmstead to surrender or risk having the entire fort explode if a shell hit the powder magazine, killing everyone within.

A couple other interesting facts: there is a brick in the floor of the fort with a paw print from when the brick was made, close to 200 years ago. You can see that paw print in the photo above. And the first baseball game ever photographed took place in the central courtyard in 1862 (when the fort was under Union control).

Hilton Head Island

After Fort Pulaski it was time to drive an hour around the marshlands (as the crow flies the distance is only a few miles, but by road its around 40 miles) to Hilton Head Island where we would spend the next two nights before heading home.

We had a townhome rental with separate rooms and a kitchen which was a nice change from hotel rooms. We were staying at the Coral Sands Resort. With only a half mile walk to the beach it was in a great location and the price was very reasonable as well. There was a curious site of a tree growing in a gutter which I couldn’t help but photograph.

The weather was finally warming up enough that the following day would be beach weather. We stopped off for a pizza dinner and called it a night.