America's most hauntingly beautiful city — where Savannah's 22 original squares (each a shaded park surrounded by Greek Revival, Federal, and Italianate townhouses draped in Spanish moss, the largest urban planned square grid in the USA) were laid out by General James Oglethorpe in 1733 and survived the Civil War intact because General Sherman refused to burn the city when he reached it in December 1864 (he presented it to President Lincoln as a Christmas gift instead), the Forsyth Park fountain (1858, the most photographed object in Savannah) is surrounded by the largest contiguous live oak canopy in any American city, the River Street cobblestones are ballast stones from ships that sailed to Savannah in colonial trade, and the city has more ghosts per square mile — according to every American paranormal authority — than any other city in the USA
Savannah (150,000 city; 400,000 metro) is the oldest city in Georgia and the colonial capital of the Province of Georgia — a planned city on the Savannah River bluff whose 22-square grid plan (laid out 1733, still intact) is one of the most intact examples of colonial urban planning in the Americas. The city's refusal to burn during the Civil War preserved its antebellum architecture entirely, and it is now one of the largest National Historic Landmark Districts in the USA.
James Oglethorpe founded Savannah in February 1733 as the first settlement of the Province of Georgia (the 13th and last of Britain's original American colonies) — specifically siting it on a 40-foot bluff above the Savannah River for defensive advantage. Oglethorpe's ward-and-square urban plan (each 'ward' of 40 lots arranged around a central square with civic buildings on the east and west) was a radical experiment in planned community design that still defines Savannah's street grid almost 300 years later. During the Civil War, Savannah was a critical Confederate port; when Union General W…