Had a tour guide in Savannah tell me the city was built on top of an old cemetery

I was on a weekend trip to Savannah last month and took this walking tour with a guy named Mike. He pointed out that a bunch of downtown buildings sit right over forgotten graves from the 1800s. He said they just paved over everything instead of moving the bodies. Has anyone else heard stories like that about old cities in the South?

3 comments

3 Comments

wesley1812d ago

Yeah so that's mostly true but Mike kinda simplified it. Savannah does have a lot of old burial grounds but the big one under everything is the Colonial Park Cemetery, they just expanded the city right over parts of it. Not every building is on top of a grave though, that's a bit of an exaggeration the tour guides love to tell.

the_amy2d ago

Oh man, this is literally one of my favorite Savannah rabbit holes to fall into! I actually read this article a while back from some local historian who dug into the city records, and she found out that a lot of the graves were moved from Colonial Park to Bonaventure in the late 1800s, but they definitely didn't get all of them. So yeah, you're totally right that it's not every single building, but there are spots where they just built right over the original plots and forgot about them for a hundred years. I remember she talked about how they found a whole row of unmarked graves under a parking lot near Broughton Street during some construction work in the 90s. It kind of makes you wonder what else is just sitting there under all that concrete and brick.

morgan_martinez1d ago

Brings to mind how much forgotten history is just buried under our everyday lives, @the_amy.