Pirates Just staying around the City Market in the historic area is enough of a location to keep you busy, entertained, educated, even ‘scared’ on a trip to Savannah, Georgia.
The Market is in one of the 22 squares that delineate a planned community for one of the oldest states in the Union, and it’s an area, like pretty much all of Savannah’s historic area, that blends fact and fiction in a way that delights the thousands of visitors who want to enjoy the charm and friendliness of the people together with some of the oddities of the South.
One of the more amazing organizations in Georgia is SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design. First created in Savannah as a college for art and design in 1978, it originally consisted of one building and had 78 students earning degrees in fields not offered at any other colleges in the South or southeast at that time.
Today, less than 50 years later, it includes 75 buildings and has thousands of students in a variety of art and design fields from murals to architecture. It is a private school and now has locations here, in Atlanta, Georgia and Lacoste France and offers more than 100 degrees and 75 minors.
SCAD has dorms and student housing in several places around the city, its own bussing for students, and a Museum of Art that features works of the students themselves, as well as gift shops where their talent is for sale. Its contributions to preservation of history in restoration of historic sites have earned it numerous honors from both historic foundations and architectural institutions.
Intellectual yet fun as it is, SCAD shares all it offers with so many other museums, restaurants, and tourist attractions including the Juliet Low Museum, the home of the founder of the Girl Scouts, the Telfair Museums, the oldest public art museum in the South . That was founded in 1883 when local philanthropist Mary Telfair left her home and its furnishings to the Georgia Historical Society to be opened as a museum. The Museum is actually three different buildings, all offering something different in art, history and architecture from three different collections.
And of course for those of who love the unusual and ghosts, there are plenty of museums, stories, and oddities to keep both pirates and ghosts alive and entertaining. There’s also a terrific Prohibition Museum that reminds those of us along the Jersey Coast that some of the names from the Roaring’ 20s are as well known down South as they are here, from Machine Gun Kelly to Al Capone. It’s a fun museum that shows how this 13 year attempt at regulating the morals and drinking habits of Americans did not work, but certainly introduced bootlegging and lots of other crime to cities and towns alike.
Also in the City Market, and down a flight of outdoor steps adorned with a cannon, is the Savannah Pirates and Treasure Museum, a sensational fairly new attraction to Savannah that highlights some of that true, and perhaps not so true or legendary stories about well known pirates. Statues, pictures, talking models and scenery in a museum too dark to appreciate it all highlights piracy and tells stories of how even naval ship captains created their own pirates by cruel treatment forcing their crews to mutiny .
The Museum tells its own version of the story of Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard, and the La Concorde, the French slave ship he captured and renamed the Queen Anne’s Revenge, as well as Stede Bonnet, better known as the Gentleman Pirate, who captained his own ship as a buccaneer and actually paid wages to his crew.
The last section of the museum is posted with warnings to parents alerting them of the cruelties that are on display in that very darkened section of the underground exhibit.And cruel and distasteful they are, from hangings and knifings, to beatings and more, the museum posts it all as its final display. But it’s all part of a museum where you get to see things you wouldn’t otherwise witness.
Ghosts are alive and well all over the City Market and beyond, with several restaurants dedicated to them, museums on crime, cults and secret societies highlighting them, paranormal professionals ready to read futures or investigate the past and stores for purchase of crystals, minerals, ritual paraphernalia and books on the paranormal.
While ghosts, pirates, artisans, architects and professionals in numerous other fields of interests are all part of a busy Southern city that boasts honestly enough it offers something for everyone, there are places of worship as well that are not only active and offering religious services, but are also museums that house artifacts and are unique in architecture and interior. Congregation Mickve Israel and St. John the Baptist Cathedral both hold stories of how the Jewish residents and Irish Catholics or earlier eras helped make Savannah a vital Southern city and both remain important parts of the community today.
Pirates Pirates Pirates Pirates Pirates
