Tour Descriptions
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North Tour
“The South Carolina Lowcountry” leads into South Carolina to the Fife Plantation, Beaufort, St. Helena Island, the Penn Center and Daufuskie Island.
This two-bus tour offers the option of making an earlier or later departure. The early departure will begin with the Fife Plantation on the Savannah River, probably the most evocative relict rice-growing landscape in the lowcountry, also featuring a mid-20th-century hunting lodge/plantation house and an early 20th-century laborer’s dwelling. Both busses will then proceed to Beaufort, S.C. (1712), a town like Savannah with early 18th-century roots, but a largely 19th-century fabric. Some 30 buildings will be open for viewing, including the John Mark Verdier House, (1801-05), the McGrath-Scheper House (1835), St. Helena’s Episcopal Church (1817, 1842), and the First African Baptist Church (1885). The next stop will be St. Helena Island with a quick look at the St. Helena Island Chapel of Ease, a 1740s tabby and brick Anglican Church ruin, and a lengthy stop at the Penn Center (1862-present), famous as an early school for freed Sea Island slaves and in the 1960s as a planning site for Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The appreciation of Gullah culture will continue with a later afternoon visit to Daufuskie Island. Accessible only by boat, this barrier island retains extremely fine although very threatened late 19th- and early 20th-century African-American architecture. A Gullah dinner will be served, accompanied by an oyster roast at Freeport Marina on Daufuskie’s Back River.
West Tour
“Inland Between the Savannah and the Ogeechee” leads to Port Wentworth, Meldrim, the Niedlinger/Monroe Farm, the Rieser-Zoller Farm, Springfield, the Effingham Methodist Camp Meeting Ground and New Ebenezer.
For all those participants who think that Savannah has nothing but surrounding marshes and beach, this tour highlights the upcountry of the lowcountry with a history of mixed agriculture and cotton fields, and a more recent past of pine woods and subdivisions. The first stops on the Savannah River emphasize industry with a visit to the Atlantic Wood Plant (est. 1920), makers of creosoted railroad ties and penta-preserved telephone poles, and visits to the Dixie Crystal company town of Port Wentworth (1920s-50s), and the railroad town of Meldrim (1890). German traditions get recognition with stops at several distinct Salzburger homesteads including the Niedlinger/Monroe Farm (est. 1788) with a plank-log square-notch cabin of indeterminate date and a circa 1900 main house, the Rieser-Zoller Farm (est. 1800) with a remarkably intact 1870s cabin and a 1900 I-house addition, and a superb array of outbuildings including a tobacco barn, cattle barn, well-sweep and even a Farmer’s Educational and Cooperative Union Store, among others. The Effingham Methodist Camp Meeting Site (est. 1792) and Jerusalem Lutheran Church (1767-69) round out the day with two of the more important religious sites in the state. Dinner will be accompanied by country music along the high bluff of the Savannah River at New Ebenezer, settled in 1736 by the Salzburgers.
South Tour
“South Along the Georgia Coast” leads to Lebanon Plantation, the R. H. Gould homestead, Midway Congregational Church, Dorchester Academy, Seabrook Village, Palmyra Plantation, Darien, Valona and Shellman Bluff.
Following the old coastal highway, this tour begins with dramatic contrasts. On the one hand are rich drive-bys of rotting automobile landscapes like the oldest Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge in the nation, contrasted with massive upstart resort plantation developments like the 5,000-acre Berwick Plantation and the 8,000-acre Ritz-Carlton mega-star “destination.” The first stops are increasingly remarkable hold-outs: the 3,000-acre Lebanon Plantation with an 1804 core added onto grandly in the early 20th century and the precious R. H. Gould coastal cottage of 1810. Next will be Midway with the Midway Congregational Church of 1792 and adjacent cemetery of 1752 and after, and Dorchester Academy, an important site for education of freed blacks from 1868, with a prominent boys’ dormitory from 1934 extant, and a strong history of civil rights activities with Andrew Young and Martin Luther King. The area’s African-American heritage will be further appreciated by viewing Seabrook Village, a pioneering open-air museum of African-American buildings, and nearby Palmyra Plantation (1848). Further stops include Darien (1736) on the Altamaha River; the Ridge, a national register community of ships’ captains’ houses; Valona, an isolated bluff with two active but quite distinct shrimp docks; and then the day ends in Shellman Bluff, a recreational fish camp. Dinner will be a variation of fried fish, hush puppies and Brunswick, Ga. stew served while overlooking Sapelo Sound.
Greater Savannah Tour #1
“African-American and Coastal Communities #1” leads to Carver Heights, Cloverdale, Cuyler-Brownsville, Drouillard-Maupas House, Dixon Park, Pine Gardens and Tybee Island.
There are three Greater Savannah Tours and each is a unique slice of metropolitan Savannah and surrounding Chatham County with distinct but overlapping characters. As with all the tours, the aim is to celebrate areas and sites that are significant but underappreciated, and usually far from the tourists’ eyes. All Greater Savannah Tours end together on Tybee Island.
Greater Savannah Tour #1 goes first to a medley of distinct African-American neighborhoods: Cuyler-Brownsville, founded soon after the Civil War and housing many of Savannah’s early black professionals; Carver Heights, begun in 1946 as the first all-black subdivision in Savannah; and then Cloverdale, a 1960s and 1970s black suburb. The tour then visits the Drouillard-Maupas House (1799), a classic coastal cottage, and then Dixon Park, site of Savannah’s Black Carnegie Library (1914) and James Kimble’s New Black Panthers’ Black Holocaust Monument (2002-present), in part a response to a more conventional African-American Monument placed on River Street. The tour then proceeds to Pine Gardens, a mid-20th-century neighborhood built for white workers of the Southeastern Shipbuilding Corporation that manufactured 88 Liberty Ships during World War II. The later afternoon is spent on sites on Tybee Island, the barrier island just east of Savannah once known as Savannah Beach. Participants will explore a selection of back river cottages from the 1880s-1920s, strand cottages from 1890s-1920s, raised Tybee cottages from the 1920s-30s, and then one of the best preserved lighthouse and keeper’s complexes in the country (1773; 1866-1885). Dinner will be served overlooking the ocean at the Tybee Lite Shrine Club atop a battery of Fort Screven.
Greater Savannah Tour #2
“African-American and Coastal Communities #2” leads to Wormsloe Plantation, Isle of Hope, Sandfly, Pinpoint, Montgomery, Thunderbolt and Tybee Island.
Greater Savannah Tour #2 heads directly to one of the most cherished landmarks of colonial Savannah, the tabby ruins of Noble Jones’ fortified house of 1739 and 1745. A marsh-front walk leads to the remaining slave quarter of the Wormsloe Plantation established by Jones’ descendents, and then on to the grand freestanding library (1907) of further descendents, the DeRennes, and their massive big house (1828, 1890s, 1930s). The tour then proceeds to a walk along the bluff at the Isle of Hope, a popular summer destination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a stop at the Chapel of Our Lady of Good Hope (1874) and then a visit to Sandfly, a community established by slaves freed from Wormsloe. Further visits include other post-bellum, largely African-American communities of Pinpoint and Montgomery, with highlights such as the Varn Oyster Factory and the Turner-Hodge-Young Community Association Building. The tour then proceeds to Thunderbolt and the historically black Savannah State University, originally Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth (1891), Nelson’s Quality Shrimp Dock, and the authentic mid-20th-century fishcamp restaurant Desposito’s for an afternoon snack. The later afternoon is spent on sites on Tybee Island, the barrier island just east of Savannah once known as Savannah Beach. Participants will explore a selection of back river cottages from the 1880s-1920s, strand cottages from 1890s-1920s, raised Tybee cottages from the 1920s-30s, and then one of the best preserved lighthouse and keeper’s complexes in the country (1773; 1866-1885). Dinner will be served overlooking the ocean at the Tybee Lite Shrine Club atop a battery of Fort Screven.
Greater Savannah Tour #3
“Industrial, African-American and Coastal Communities” leads to the Coastal Machine Shop, Jarrel’s Gym, the Savannah-Ogeechee Canal, the Georgia Port Authority, Clearview Housing, the Chatham County Farmer’s Market, the Savannah Railroad Station, Yellow Trucking Intermodal Transport Facility, Carver Heights, Duffy and Jefferson streets intersection, St. Philip Monumental A. M. E. Church and Tybee Island.
If you have never visited a boxing gym or an intermodal transport facility before, this is the VAF tour for you. Beginning along Savannah’s waterfront and Savannah’s still active industrial edge, this tour looks at a machine shop, Jarrell’s (Boxing) Gym, and then, while standing under the gigantic Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge (1991), examines the first lock of the Savannah-Ogeechee Canal (1831). Issues of trade and commerce continue with a tour of one portion of the Georgia Port Authority (est. 1945), the entity that makes Savannah the fourth largest container port in the nation, with appreciation of some older swallowed-up structures like the early 20th-century Ocean Steamship Terminal. Further west along the Savannah River we will observe Clearview, a massive block of early- to mid-20th-century worker housing set with a backdrop of Union Bag (now International Paper), and other industries like Great Dane Tractor Trailer and Colonial Oil. The tour proceeds west along Highway 80 (the old Dixie Overland Highway) to the Chatham County Farmer’s Market—the very market that replaced the City Market, the traumatic loss of which, in 1954, helped set Savannah on a path of preservation. Further stops include the Savannah Railroad Station (a replacement of the demolished Union Station downtown), the Yellow Truck Intermodal Transport Facility, both great 1960s buildings, and Savannah’s Victorian neighborhood corner of Duffy and Jefferson streets, where Johnny’s Squeeze-in Confectionary, Zeny’s Restaurant and the Community Hair Care Center vie for attention with some of the best porch-front houses in Savannah and the nearby St. Philip “Monumental” A. M. E. Church (c.1890). The later afternoon is spent on sites on Tybee Island, the barrier island just east of Savannah once known as Savannah Beach. Participants will explore a selection of back river cottages from the 1880s-1920s, strand cottages from 1890s-1920s, raised Tybee cottages from the 1920s-30s, and then one of the best preserved lighthouse and keeper’s complexes in the country (1773; 1866-1885). Dinner will be served overlooking the ocean at the Tybee Lite Shrine Club atop a battery of Fort Screven.
North Tour
“The South Carolina Lowcountry” leads into South Carolina to the Fife Plantation, Beaufort, St. Helena Island, the Penn Center and Daufuskie Island.
This two-bus tour offers the option of making an earlier or later departure. The early departure will begin with the Fife Plantation on the Savannah River, probably the most evocative relict rice-growing landscape in the lowcountry, also featuring a mid-20th-century hunting lodge/plantation house and an early 20th-century laborer’s dwelling. Both busses will then proceed to Beaufort, S.C. (1712), a town like Savannah with early 18th-century roots, but a largely 19th-century fabric. Some 30 buildings will be open for viewing, including the John Mark Verdier House, (1801-05), the McGrath-Scheper House (1835), St. Helena’s Episcopal Church (1817, 1842), and the First African Baptist Church (1885). The next stop will be St. Helena Island with a quick look at the St. Helena Island Chapel of Ease, a 1740s tabby and brick Anglican Church ruin, and a lengthy stop at the Penn Center (1862-present), famous as an early school for freed Sea Island slaves and in the 1960s as a planning site for Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The appreciation of Gullah culture will continue with a later afternoon visit to Daufuskie Island. Accessible only by boat, this barrier island retains extremely fine although very threatened late 19th- and early 20th-century African-American architecture. A Gullah dinner will be served, accompanied by an oyster roast at Freeport Marina on Daufuskie’s Back River.
West Tour
“Inland Between the Savannah and the Ogeechee” leads to Port Wentworth, Meldrim, the Niedlinger/Monroe Farm, the Rieser-Zoller Farm, Springfield, the Effingham Methodist Camp Meeting Ground and New Ebenezer.
For all those participants who think that Savannah has nothing but surrounding marshes and beach, this tour highlights the upcountry of the lowcountry with a history of mixed agriculture and cotton fields, and a more recent past of pine woods and subdivisions. The first stops on the Savannah River emphasize industry with a visit to the Atlantic Wood Plant (est. 1920), makers of creosoted railroad ties and penta-preserved telephone poles, and visits to the Dixie Crystal company town of Port Wentworth (1920s-50s), and the railroad town of Meldrim (1890). German traditions get recognition with stops at several distinct Salzburger homesteads including the Niedlinger/Monroe Farm (est. 1788) with a plank-log square-notch cabin of indeterminate date and a circa 1900 main house, the Rieser-Zoller Farm (est. 1800) with a remarkably intact 1870s cabin and a 1900 I-house addition, and a superb array of outbuildings including a tobacco barn, cattle barn, well-sweep and even a Farmer’s Educational and Cooperative Union Store, among others. The Effingham Methodist Camp Meeting Site (est. 1792) and Jerusalem Lutheran Church (1767-69) round out the day with two of the more important religious sites in the state. Dinner will be accompanied by country music along the high bluff of the Savannah River at New Ebenezer, settled in 1736 by the Salzburgers.
South Tour
“South Along the Georgia Coast” leads to Lebanon Plantation, the R. H. Gould homestead, Midway Congregational Church, Dorchester Academy, Seabrook Village, Palmyra Plantation, Darien, Valona and Shellman Bluff.
Following the old coastal highway, this tour begins with dramatic contrasts. On the one hand are rich drive-bys of rotting automobile landscapes like the oldest Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge in the nation, contrasted with massive upstart resort plantation developments like the 5,000-acre Berwick Plantation and the 8,000-acre Ritz-Carlton mega-star “destination.” The first stops are increasingly remarkable hold-outs: the 3,000-acre Lebanon Plantation with an 1804 core added onto grandly in the early 20th century and the precious R. H. Gould coastal cottage of 1810. Next will be Midway with the Midway Congregational Church of 1792 and adjacent cemetery of 1752 and after, and Dorchester Academy, an important site for education of freed blacks from 1868, with a prominent boys’ dormitory from 1934 extant, and a strong history of civil rights activities with Andrew Young and Martin Luther King. The area’s African-American heritage will be further appreciated by viewing Seabrook Village, a pioneering open-air museum of African-American buildings, and nearby Palmyra Plantation (1848). Further stops include Darien (1736) on the Altamaha River; the Ridge, a national register community of ships’ captains’ houses; Valona, an isolated bluff with two active but quite distinct shrimp docks; and then the day ends in Shellman Bluff, a recreational fish camp. Dinner will be a variation of fried fish, hush puppies and Brunswick, Ga. stew served while overlooking Sapelo Sound.
Greater Savannah Tour #1
“African-American and Coastal Communities #1” leads to Carver Heights, Cloverdale, Cuyler-Brownsville, Drouillard-Maupas House, Dixon Park, Pine Gardens and Tybee Island.
There are three Greater Savannah Tours and each is a unique slice of metropolitan Savannah and surrounding Chatham County with distinct but overlapping characters. As with all the tours, the aim is to celebrate areas and sites that are significant but underappreciated, and usually far from the tourists’ eyes. All Greater Savannah Tours end together on Tybee Island.
Greater Savannah Tour #1 goes first to a medley of distinct African-American neighborhoods: Cuyler-Brownsville, founded soon after the Civil War and housing many of Savannah’s early black professionals; Carver Heights, begun in 1946 as the first all-black subdivision in Savannah; and then Cloverdale, a 1960s and 1970s black suburb. The tour then visits the Drouillard-Maupas House (1799), a classic coastal cottage, and then Dixon Park, site of Savannah’s Black Carnegie Library (1914) and James Kimble’s New Black Panthers’ Black Holocaust Monument (2002-present), in part a response to a more conventional African-American Monument placed on River Street. The tour then proceeds to Pine Gardens, a mid-20th-century neighborhood built for white workers of the Southeastern Shipbuilding Corporation that manufactured 88 Liberty Ships during World War II. The later afternoon is spent on sites on Tybee Island, the barrier island just east of Savannah once known as Savannah Beach. Participants will explore a selection of back river cottages from the 1880s-1920s, strand cottages from 1890s-1920s, raised Tybee cottages from the 1920s-30s, and then one of the best preserved lighthouse and keeper’s complexes in the country (1773; 1866-1885). Dinner will be served overlooking the ocean at the Tybee Lite Shrine Club atop a battery of Fort Screven.
Greater Savannah Tour #2
“African-American and Coastal Communities #2” leads to Wormsloe Plantation, Isle of Hope, Sandfly, Pinpoint, Montgomery, Thunderbolt and Tybee Island.
Greater Savannah Tour #2 heads directly to one of the most cherished landmarks of colonial Savannah, the tabby ruins of Noble Jones’ fortified house of 1739 and 1745. A marsh-front walk leads to the remaining slave quarter of the Wormsloe Plantation established by Jones’ descendents, and then on to the grand freestanding library (1907) of further descendents, the DeRennes, and their massive big house (1828, 1890s, 1930s). The tour then proceeds to a walk along the bluff at the Isle of Hope, a popular summer destination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a stop at the Chapel of Our Lady of Good Hope (1874) and then a visit to Sandfly, a community established by slaves freed from Wormsloe. Further visits include other post-bellum, largely African-American communities of Pinpoint and Montgomery, with highlights such as the Varn Oyster Factory and the Turner-Hodge-Young Community Association Building. The tour then proceeds to Thunderbolt and the historically black Savannah State University, originally Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth (1891), Nelson’s Quality Shrimp Dock, and the authentic mid-20th-century fishcamp restaurant Desposito’s for an afternoon snack. The later afternoon is spent on sites on Tybee Island, the barrier island just east of Savannah once known as Savannah Beach. Participants will explore a selection of back river cottages from the 1880s-1920s, strand cottages from 1890s-1920s, raised Tybee cottages from the 1920s-30s, and then one of the best preserved lighthouse and keeper’s complexes in the country (1773; 1866-1885). Dinner will be served overlooking the ocean at the Tybee Lite Shrine Club atop a battery of Fort Screven.
Greater Savannah Tour #3
“Industrial, African-American and Coastal Communities” leads to the Coastal Machine Shop, Jarrel’s Gym, the Savannah-Ogeechee Canal, the Georgia Port Authority, Clearview Housing, the Chatham County Farmer’s Market, the Savannah Railroad Station, Yellow Trucking Intermodal Transport Facility, Carver Heights, Duffy and Jefferson streets intersection, St. Philip Monumental A. M. E. Church and Tybee Island.
If you have never visited a boxing gym or an intermodal transport facility before, this is the VAF tour for you. Beginning along Savannah’s waterfront and Savannah’s still active industrial edge, this tour looks at a machine shop, Jarrell’s (Boxing) Gym, and then, while standing under the gigantic Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge (1991), examines the first lock of the Savannah-Ogeechee Canal (1831). Issues of trade and commerce continue with a tour of one portion of the Georgia Port Authority (est. 1945), the entity that makes Savannah the fourth largest container port in the nation, with appreciation of some older swallowed-up structures like the early 20th-century Ocean Steamship Terminal. Further west along the Savannah River we will observe Clearview, a massive block of early- to mid-20th-century worker housing set with a backdrop of Union Bag (now International Paper), and other industries like Great Dane Tractor Trailer and Colonial Oil. The tour proceeds west along Highway 80 (the old Dixie Overland Highway) to the Chatham County Farmer’s Market—the very market that replaced the City Market, the traumatic loss of which, in 1954, helped set Savannah on a path of preservation. Further stops include the Savannah Railroad Station (a replacement of the demolished Union Station downtown), the Yellow Truck Intermodal Transport Facility, both great 1960s buildings, and Savannah’s Victorian neighborhood corner of Duffy and Jefferson streets, where Johnny’s Squeeze-in Confectionary, Zeny’s Restaurant and the Community Hair Care Center vie for attention with some of the best porch-front houses in Savannah and the nearby St. Philip “Monumental” A. M. E. Church (c.1890). The later afternoon is spent on sites on Tybee Island, the barrier island just east of Savannah once known as Savannah Beach. Participants will explore a selection of back river cottages from the 1880s-1920s, strand cottages from 1890s-1920s, raised Tybee cottages from the 1920s-30s, and then one of the best preserved lighthouse and keeper’s complexes in the country (1773; 1866-1885). Dinner will be served overlooking the ocean at the Tybee Lite Shrine Club atop a battery of Fort Screven.
