Bonaventure Cemetery
Interesting facts
- The marble statue of six-year-old Gracie Watson, who died in 1889, was carved by John Walz from a photograph and is one of Georgia's few grave monuments in exact likeness.
- Little Gracie's grave became so popular with visitors that it was enclosed by a fence in 1999.
- John Muir slept among the graves because it was the safest and cheapest shelter he could find while waiting for money to be sent from home.
- The Bird Girl was sculpted in 1936 by Sylvia Shaw Judson, and the bowls in her hands were meant to hold food or water for birds.
- Photographer Jack Leigh found the Bird Girl at dusk on his second day of searching the cemetery, then reportedly spent ten hours in the darkroom on the cover image.
- The Gaston Tomb by the gates, known as the Stranger's Tomb, had a vault where visitors who died in Savannah could rest until relatives arranged their burial.
- According to legend, when the plantation house burned during a dinner party in 1771, the host had guests finish their meal in the garden by firelight.
- In 1776 the estate's owners helped Georgia's deposed royal governor, James Wright, escape through Bonaventure to a British warship.
- During the Siege of Savannah in 1779 the plantation mansion was used as a hospital.
- Johnny Mercer is buried here, and so is his great-grandfather Hugh W. Mercer, a Confederate general.
Why it is worth it
Avenues of old live oaks hung with Spanish moss shade the graves of Bonaventure, a cemetery on a bluff above the Wilmington River just east of Savannah, Georgia. Marble angels, family plots behind iron railings and Victorian monuments sit in a half-light of grey moss and green leaves, and the place has drawn writers, painters and photographers for more than 150 years.
The land was once Bonaventure Plantation, laid out in the colonial era by Colonel John Mullryne and later held by the Tattnall family, whose private burial ground lay on the estate. In 1846 Commodore Josiah Tattnall III sold the 600-acre property, family cemetery included, to Peter Wiltberger, and the first public burials began in 1850. In 1868 his son William founded the Evergreen Cemetery Company to run it, and on 7 July 1907 the City of Savannah bought the company and turned the grounds into a municipal cemetery under the old name, Bonaventure. Today it covers about 160 acres. Among those buried here are the songwriter Johnny Mercer, a native of Savannah, the poet Conrad Aiken and the philanthropist Mary Telfair; the cemetery also has one of the largest sections in the country for those who died in the Spanish-American War.
In 1867 the young naturalist John Muir, on his thousand-mile walk from Kentucky to the Gulf of Mexico, spent six days and nights at Bonaventure, sleeping among the graves, and later described the oaks and the place in a chapter called "Camping in the Tombs". Wider fame came with John Berendt's 1994 book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, whose cover showed the Bird Girl statue from a family plot here; the statue has since been moved to the Telfair Museums in the city. Savannah, founded in 1733 as the first settlement of the colony of Georgia, is known for its grid of leafy squares, which makes the moss-hung avenues of its great cemetery feel like a natural extension of the town.
Getting there
Bonaventure Cemetery lies at 330 Bonaventure Road, about 7 km from the centre of Savannah. The nearest airport is Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport (SAV), about 17 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Bonaventure Cemetery is a rural cemetery located on a scenic bluff of the Wilmington River, southeast of downtown Savannah, Georgia. The cemetery's prominence grew when it was featured in the 1994 novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, and in the subsequent movie, directed by Clint Eastwood, based on the book. It is the largest of the city's municipal cemeteries, containing nearly 160 acres (0.65 km2).
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