Savannah

Savannah was founded on February 12, 1733, when General James Edward Oglethorpe and 114 colonists arrived on a bluff overlooking the Savannah River. Georgia was the last of Britain’s thirteen American colonies, and Oglethorpe’s vision for it was unlike anything that had come before. He envisioned a colony built on principles of equality, industry, and temperance — a social experiment as much as a settlement.

Oglethorpe’s plan for the city was revolutionary. Rather than the irregular, haphazard growth that characterized most colonial settlements, he designed a formal urban grid organized around public squares. Each ward — a repeating unit of the city plan — featured a central square flanked by residential lots, with trust lots reserved for public buildings on the east and west sides. The system was geometrically elegant and socially progressive, ensuring that every citizen had equal access to shared public space.

That original plan survived and expanded over the following century. By the time Savannah’s growth outpaced the ward system, twenty-two squares had been laid out. The city that Oglethorpe set in motion became one of the most prosperous ports in the American South, surviving the Revolutionary War, the Civil War — General Sherman famously spared it during his March to the Sea, offering it to President Lincoln as a Christmas gift — and the long decades of change that followed.

The squares are the heart of Savannah. They are the reason the city feels different from any other American city — the reason walking through the historic district is an experience of constant, quiet discovery. Every few blocks, the street opens into a canopy of live oaks, a fountain or monument at the center, benches along the paths, the sounds of the city momentarily softened by green space and shade.

Of the twenty-two original squares, twenty-one survive today. Ellis Square was paved over in the 1950s to make room for a parking garage but was restored and rededicated in 2010. Liberty Square, sadly, was lost to road widening and has not been rebuilt. The remaining squares range from grand civic spaces like Chippewa Square — where the bench scenes from Forrest Gumpwere filmed — to intimate, secluded gardens like Whitefield Square.

Each square has its own character, its own history, its own congregation of oaks. Johnson Square, the first and largest, was the center of the original settlement. Monterey Square, with its monument to Count Casimir Pulaski, became famous through John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Lafayette Square honors the Marquis de Lafayette, who visited Savannah in 1825. Together, they form a necklace of public spaces that gives the city its distinctive rhythm: walk, pause, breathe, walk again.

Quercus virginiana, the Southern live oak, is the tree that defines the Savannah landscape. Unlike deciduous oaks, live oaks are evergreen, holding their dark, leathery leaves year-round. They grow outward rather than upward, their massive horizontal branches sometimes extending sixty feet or more from the trunk, often sweeping so low they nearly touch the ground before curving back toward the sky. A mature live oak can have a canopy spread exceeding one hundred feet.

In Savannah, these trees are everywhere: lining the streets, filling the squares, shading the parks. Many of the oaks in the historic district are two to three hundred years old. They are draped in Tillandsia usneoides— Spanish moss — an epiphytic bromeliad that is neither Spanish nor moss. It hangs from the branches in long, silver-gray curtains, swaying gently in the breeze, filtering the light into something soft and diffused. The combination of the massive oaks and the trailing moss creates an atmosphere that is unmistakably, irreplaceably Savannah.

It is this landscape — this particular quality of light and shadow and green — that inspired our Oak design. The live oak is not just a tree in Savannah. It is the character of the place made visible.

Savannah has long been known as the “Hostess City of the South,” a title that reflects its deeply ingrained culture of hospitality and its tradition of welcoming visitors with warmth and generosity. But the city’s cultural identity runs far deeper than hospitality alone.

The Savannah College of Art and Design — SCAD — has transformed the city into one of the most vibrant creative communities in the American South. Since its founding in 1978, SCAD has restored dozens of historic buildings, attracted thousands of artists and designers, and infused the city with a creative energy that permeates its galleries, restaurants, and streetscapes. Savannah’s food scene has evolved dramatically as well, from traditional Lowcountry cuisine — shrimp and grits, she-crab soup, pralines — to a new generation of restaurants that draw on global influences while honoring local ingredients and traditions.

The architecture alone is a museum. Federal, Regency, Victorian, Gothic Revival, Italianate, and Romanesque buildings stand side by side in the historic district, preserved with a care that few American cities can match. The Mercer Williams House, the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, the Owens-Thomas House — these buildings are not just landmarks but living parts of a city that values its past without being imprisoned by it.

Savannah is a place where history and modernity coexist with unusual grace, where a three-hundred-year-old oak and a contemporary art installation can share the same square. It is this quality — this layering of time and taste and tradition — that makes the city endlessly interesting, and endlessly worthy of celebration.

This is the city that inspires everything we create at Oglethorpe Goods. The oak trees that have stood for centuries. The coordinates that mark this specific place on earth. The grid that Oglethorpe drew nearly three hundred years ago and that still shapes how people move through the city today.

We make goods that honor Savannah because Savannah deserves to be honored well. Not with generic souvenirs, but with original designs on premium materials — things that capture something true about the city and that people are proud to wear and display. Every product we make is a small act of respect for a remarkable place.

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