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Savannah Park Service Maintains City's Beauty
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No accurate look at Park Services can begin without an examination of the origin of the parks and the man behind the "plan"; General James Edward Oglethorpe (1696-1785). Oglethorpe left Oxford University to pursue a military career in the service of Queen Anne's Guards. He was elected to Parliament in his twenties and while serving as head of the prison reform committee, he conceived the idea of a humanitarian colony. At the age of 36, he led the "Great Experiment" to Georgia.
He was recognized two centuries after his death by the American Society of Civil Engineers who designated his plan of Savannah a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. This Plan has no known predecessor and no exact imitator.
In designing Savannah, the 13th colony, Oglethorpe had to allow for not only the social, religious, and economic life of the people, but for the defense of the colony as well. He devised a basic module which could be repeated to the limit of the allotted land reserved for Savannah by the Trustees of the Colony of Georgia.
The basic unit of the ward, a nearly square rectangle of about seven hundred feet per side. Intersecting streets divide this ward into four equal quadrangles, each containing a fourth of the central plaza, one large trust lot, and a group of ten house lots called a tything. The tything was divided into parallel rows of five, sixty foot by ninety foot, lots separated by a lane. The trust lots were reserved by the Trustees for special grants and public buildings; and the earliest lots were sites for the public store, the mill, the oven, and Christ Church, which still occupies it's original trust lot.
A "ward", in short, was an area which could serve forty family structures, four public functions, and a central open space or square.
From the very beginning, the squares were multipurpose units. They performed the functions of gathering places, meeting grounds, markets and military drill yards.
During 1733-34, Oglethorpe supervised the laying out of six such modules. Until after the revolution, Savannah remained a town of six wards and six squares. By 1790, Savannah was an officially incorporated American city. With minor variation in dimension, and allowing for the inclusion of the Colonial Cemetery, the wise city fathers followed Oglethorpe's plan as Savannah grew up to the legal limits of it's original charter.
At it's completion, Savannah contained twenty four squares and the Colonial Cemetery as "open greenspaces".
Over the next 200 years, the names and faces of city fathers changed many times but the City's dedication to the ideals and vision of Oglethorpe remained a moving force that saw the creation of many other Parks and greenspace areas such as Dixon Park, Myers Park, the Ardsley Park series of properties, and the incomparable Atlantic Mall/Baldwin Park. This same vision is witnessing the creation of an entirely new series of public parks. One of the first of these is the Cuyler-Brownsville project that will tout a park space at the center of an urban re-creation of beautiful period homes set in the same format as the original ward plan.
Source: City of Savannah
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