Letters of a Traveller; Or, Notes of Things Seen in Europe and AmericaBryant, William Cullen
General
Letters of a Traveller; Or, Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America
Bryant, William Cullen
Cuba -- Description and travel; Europe -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
Savannah is beautifully laid out; its broad streets are thickly planted
with the Pride of India, and its frequent open squares shaded with trees
of various kinds. Oglethorpe seems to have understood how a city should be
built in a warm climate, and the people of the place are fond of reminding
the stranger that the original plan of the founder has never been departed
from. The town, so charmingly embowered, reminded me of New Haven, though
the variety of trees is greater. In my walks about the place I passed a
large stuccoed building of a dull-yellow color, with broad arched windows,
and a stately portico, on each side of which stood a stiff looking
palmetto, as if keeping guard. The grim aspect of the building led me to
ask what it was, and I was answered that it was "the old United States
Bank," It was the building in which the Savannah branch of that bank
transacted business, and is now shut up until the time shall come when
that great institution shall be revived. Meantime I was pained to see that
there exists so little reverence for its memory, and so little gratitude
for its benefits, that the boys have taken to smashing the windows, so
that those who have the care of the building have been obliged to cover
them with plank. In another part of the city I was shown an African
church, a neat, spacious wooden building, railed in, and kept in excellent
order, with a piazza extending along its entire front. It is one of the
four places of worship for the blacks of the town, and was built by negro
workmen with materials purchased by the contributions of the whites.
South of the town extends an uninclosed space, on one side of which is a
pleasant grove of pines, in the shade of which the members of a quoit-club
practice their athletic sport. Here on a Saturday afternoon, for that is
their stated time of assembling, I was introduced to some of the most
distinguished citizens of Savannah, and witnessed the skill with which
they threw the discus. No apprentices were they in the art; there was no
striking far from the stake, no sending the discus rolling over the green;
they heaped the quoits as snugly around the stakes as if the amusement
had been their profession.
In the same neighborhood, just without the town, lies the public cemetery
surrounded by an ancient wall, built before the revolution, which in some
places shows the marks of shot fired against it in the skirmishes of that
period. I entered it, hoping to find some monuments of those who founded
the city a hundred and ten years ago, but the inscriptions are of
comparatively recent date. Most of them commemorate the death of persons
born in Europe, or the northern states. I was told that the remains of the
early inhabitants lie in the brick tombs, of which there are many without
any inscription whatever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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