Savannah

Savannah's founder, James Oglethorpe, laid the city out in 1733 around a strict, repeating grid of public squares, a design so deliberate and unusual for its time that it's still cited in urban planning studies nearly three centuries later. Of the original 24 squares, 22 survive intact today, each a small park framed by historic buildings, connected by streets shaded in Spanish moss-draped live oaks that have become the single most photographed image associated with the city.

That survival owes something, according to widely repeated historical accounts, to General William Tecumseh Sherman himself. As Union forces completed their devastating March to the Sea in late 1864, leaving much of the Georgia countryside in ruins, Sherman reportedly offered Savannah to President Lincoln as a Christmas gift rather than burning it, a decision historians attribute partly to the city's orderly beauty and partly to its practical surrender without significant Confederate resistance. Whatever the precise mix of motives, the result was a historic district left largely intact, an unusual outcome for a Southern city on Sherman's path.

That intact 18th- and 19th-century fabric has since made Savannah one of the more atmospheric cities in the American South, and also one of its most reliably reputed as haunted. Centuries of yellow fever epidemics, wartime hospitals, and documented instances of graves relocated during later development have supported a substantial ghost tour industry centered on the historic district, walking tours covering everything from documented history to more speculative local legend.

The city's modern tourism boom traces significantly to John Berendt's 1994 nonfiction book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, centered on a real 1981 murder case and populated with genuinely eccentric real Savannah characters, later adapted into a Clint Eastwood film. The book's vivid, atmospheric portrayal of the city drew a wave of visitors specifically chasing the mood it captured, one that's largely held up on arrival.

Forsyth Park, anchored by its ornate fountain, sits at the historic district's southern edge, a natural gathering point framed by more of the oak-and-moss scenery that defines the city, and a fitting place to end a walk through squares that have, remarkably, changed relatively little in the centuries since Oglethorpe first laid them out.