"From the Outside In: Lowcountry Plantations and the Origins of Savannah’s Preservation Planning Ethos"

In the two decades after the Historic Savannah Foundation was founded in 1955, Savannah, Georgia, became one of the nation’s celebrated preservation successes and began its ascent as a major tourist destination. Yet this familiar narrative obscures earlier, largely forgotten efforts that shaped how Savannahians understood and managed their historic cityscape. For decades before 1955, residents promoted historic landmarks in and around their city, even as many deteriorated. Tourists routinely hired hack or auto tours of Savannah’s old homes and outlying sites such as Hermitage and Wormsloe Plantations. Although these early efforts lacked the regulatory frameworks seen in places like Charleston, South Carolina, a preservationist ethos was already emerging by the 1920s. Socially prominent Savannahians—especially women—played central roles, working individually and through organizations such as the Colonial Dames and the Girl Scouts to preserve and interpret historic properties within and beyond the city. A pivotal moment came with the demolition of Hermitage Plantation in 1935 to make way for a paper mill. Romanticized in tourism pitches for its grand house and intact row of slave quarters, the loss of the Hermitage stimulated preservation-minded activism. I argue that this event—on top of the closing of Wormsloe—sparked in-town preservation efforts that, aside from a wartime lull, continued through the founding of the Society for the Preservation of Savannah Landmarks in 1939 and into the postwar era. Reexamining these earlier decades reframes Savannah’s post-1955 preservation strategy as the product of longer-standing debates over the value of a historic cityscape.