Thursday, April 03, 2008

Savannah

What do you do when you're in Savannah on a bright sunny day, well you go for a walk in the park, but in Savannah their cemeteries are their parks. The first one we stopped at is Colonial Park (cemetery), it's a few blocks back off the river right in the middle of all the old big homes, if you have read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil or seen the movie just about everything took place with in about 3 blocks of here. We were there around lunch hour and there had to be at least 100 to 150 people walking around the place, we talked with the caretaker and he told us that although there are only about 600 stones in the cemetery there are over 6000 burials here. Part of the original cemetery is now under Oglethorpe Blvd, this happened when they widen the road, so if you are driving on Oglethorpe Blvd at night and hear something knocking on the bottom of your car you now know what it is.

This cemetery was used as a camp by Sherman's troops during the War of Northern Aggression (you learn to use a lot of new expressions after you're down here awhile), they took a lot of the stones down and stacked them in a corner so they would have enough room to exercise their horses. After they left no one knew where the stones should go, so they mounted them on the original back war of the cemetery (as you can see in the picture below)

Click to Enlarge a picture:

Notice the tombstones mounted on the wall in the background of the picture on the right.









Nathanael Greene's remains disappeared while Sherman's troop were bivouacked here, they later were found and buried in one of the downtown squares.

Just down the street is the original police barracks of Savannah.



The police department is made up of the City police and County deputies.
I looked inside the brown car and it has the same 2 channel radio that we had in Detroit when I started with Detroit.




This is the same light and siren that we had on our paddy wagon at the 4th precinct when I started on the job.










This is walking on Oglethorpe Blvd back to Colonial Park.









The jewel of Savannah, Bonaventure Cemetery, the azaleas were in full bloom and it was absolutely beautiful, we spent a few hours just walking around enjoying the flowers and statues, of course you have to stop by a few graves to pay your respects, Conrad Aiken – the Cosmo Mariner, his stone is a bench so that you can sit and enjoy the view of the river and Johnny Mercer the star of Savannah.


























About two hours of walking around and we only covered about 20% of the cemetery.













Beautiful Statues every where you looked.














Conrad Aiken & Johnny Mercier








Just a great place to spend part of the day.