Ben A.
Yelp
My wife was pretty upset when we realized in New Orleans, all too late, that the "cemetery tours" were closed for the day. She had been looking forward to them for weeks before our cross-country road trip, but we just didn't plan that part of the journey well enough. Aside: I don't ever need to go back to New Orleans, either. There, I said it.
A couple of weeks later on our trip, we found ourselves in Savannah, GA... a city we immediately fell in love with. As luck would have it, we parked the truck right next to the Colonial Park Cemetery, and, finding the gates open, we gathered our reverence and went inside the boundary.
Immediately, we were intrigued by the age of the headstones, and quickly realized that several founding fathers of our nation were buried here, including one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. A quick check of the internet on the phones revealed more information about this place. The cemetery served the community from 1750 to 1853, the latter date being the last time anyone was interred here. More than 700 Savannah residents who succumbed to yellow fever in the early 1800s are interred here too, in a mass grave.
I scolded someone's kid who was running around in there like he was at the park when he ran into a 250 year old gravestone. Told him to go stand by his mom before one of the ghosts that lives here grabs him and pulls him into the ground. His mom gave me the stink eye later during our visit, but that kid didn't step on another grave and didn't leave his mom's side the rest of the time I saw him there. Once a principal... always a.... anyway....
During our visit, the skies opened up with rain, thunder, and lightning, adding to the solemn effect of our visit. We took a few photos and left a few prayers before leaving, with the shared feeling that there was a lot more history than what we learned in our short visit.
I'm not sure what we missed in New Orleans, but this was definitely a place I'm glad we got to see in Savannah.