Please stay tuned as we gear up for a new podcast, History By GPS. Starting February 14, 2023 it will explore history and culture GPS location by GPS location in weekly posts. Our first season will highlight the American Southeast and is planned to expand from there for future seasons.
Show Notes page for the program.
If you know a location with history that should be highlighted please let us know here or at HistoryByGPS@gmail.com.
Stay tuned!
– JD Byous
Filed under History, travel, Travel Photography
Making videos are easy, I was told. They’re not. They’re work… I mean, lots of work.
Working with Trustees’ Garden in Savannah, I’ve had the pleasure and job of finding the history of the ten-acre site that was the first British-Crown sanctioned experimental garden in North America. The history of the site has been astounding when one finds the things that took place there and the people associated with the spot on the eastern side of the Historic District.
There is so much history I’ve started declaring it to be, arguably, the most historic piece ground in the southeastern United States. I qualify by saying, “If it isn’t, then it is definitely a most historic ground.”
The video…
First, the script must be written, condensed, and (semi) memorized. Then film the narrative. Then finding illustrations for which permissions can be gained. Then the editing. It’s a bunch of work… and I loved every minute.
It is fitting that a short video introduce the site. But saying that is like trimming 286 years of intense activity into a seven-minute YouTube post.
I didn’t.
I can’t.
So here’s what I was able to cram into that length of “air time.” Take a look and give me your opinion.
– JB
Filed under History, Travel Photography, Uncategorized
Matthew Hall McAllister
In 1850, and few yards offshore from the eastern end of Savannah’s Yamacraw Bluff, forty-nine-year-old Matthew Hall McAllister sailed down the river on his way to the boomtown of San Francisco. In five years, a street less than one-half mile away would carry his name. The smell of salt air and marsh mud hanged on the air as he saw visions of shining gold nuggets beyond Savannah and beyond the horizon three-thousand miles to the West. He had given up on the city of his birth. For the Georgian and local leader, it is time to move on. Fifteen miles to the south, on the Ogeechee River at Strathy Hall, were his cousins who would make history later. That branch of the family would be known for Fort McAllister and the end of the Union Army’s march through the state. Hall, as he was known, would stay in touch and for the meantime, the family ties will reach over a continent and remain.
After serving in the State Senate, Hall ran as a candidate for Governor of Georgia. He lost. He had served as mayor of the city a few years earlier, and as far as credentials go, his were admirable. In 1799 his father had been mayor and had presided over the dedication of a new Exchange Building at the end of Bull Street, a milestone in the city’s history that ushered in an age of prosperity. On his mother’s side, his grandfather, Thomas Gibbons, had also served in the office. Savannah was Hall’s birthright, a part of the genetics of his family. McAllister’s family roots may have tangled and interwoven through the city’s history, but now they were balled up, stashed aboard ship, migrating to California where a new life beckons. The West had called, His golden illusion wasn’t in the placer and hard-rock, yellow metal that others were seeking. For him, it was in the law and litigation and legislation that controlled legal tender. Gold may be where you find it, but law books and their content are where you find the real riches, power, and influence. His wife and children traveled with him to settle in the new boomtown on the bay but Georgia politicians convinced him to sail home for one last attempt to gain a US Senatorial seat. But, again, he lost.
By that time of his first voyage Savannah’s edge-of-the-river, War-of-1812 ditch and parapet at Trustees’ Garden had eroded and had filled with sand and discarded household debris. In the layers of trash and litter were fragments of butcher-cut bone, glass and ceramic shards, unrecognizable decayed nodules mixed between carbon lenses that tell of the firing of tossed household trash and plant clippings. At the top of the slope on the West, the British Revolutionary War trenches had filled with discarded bricks, metal, and trash. Times of war were behind. The need for defenses was out of mind and slowly filling out of sight.
As he sailed past, demolition work was underway to dismantle old Fort Wayne, a stronghold named for General “Mad” Anthony Wayne. Shovel by shovel, portions of the earthen stronghold disappeared the same way others on the site had in years past. As it stood, it’s a sickle-shaped earthen structure stretched one-hundred yards long arcing from the southwest to the northeast along the edge of the bluff. The “handle” section stood halfway down the slope in the center of the Trustees’ Garden, pointing to the intersection of Randolph and Broughton Streets. The blade-shaped structure led from the handle, around the bluff northward, arcing toward the intersection of Bay and East Broad Streets. The partial demolition of the fort was for progress, to take the city into the future with Savannah’s new manufactured gaslight plant. Some of the earth from the fort would fill a small terrace to hold a Gasometer tank that would rise and fall, expand and contract, regulating pressure and distributing fuel to the homes of the area. Reynolds street, laid out three decades prior to the American Revolution, was being rerouted around the bulkhead before it proceeded north to intersect Bay Street below the bluff. Gas was the modern way, the progressive way, the future for lighting, for cooking, and for heating. It epitomized the birth pangs of the industrial revolution, and Savannah is on the crest of the wave.
When Hall returned to run for the Senate, he sailed back by the site, the gas plant he saw had expanded to meet the need of the booming cotton and naval stores port. A new wall engulfed the first, looping from Bay Street, around and into the heart of the Garden intersecting with Wright Street that would become a drive and parking area for the Pirate’s House Restaurant a century later. Fort Wayne’s earthen mass was shoveled into the terrace and surrounded by a masonry wall, erasing the fort with only one brick-structured bombproof to tell of its existence though partially hidden. Except for the protective wall, the old fort is completely gone, recycled into a new fortress-looking bulkhead. During the excavation, crews found three discarded cannons from the Revolution era. Years later, gas workers would place them along the parapet creating an unintended prank that confused future generations into calling the wall, “Old Fort Wayne.” Paradoxically, the fort does remain composed of the sand-layered fill in the elongated, square enclosure. Two additional gasometers had sprung up, dominating the skyline of the bluff.
For Hall, the return was frustrating. After his loss, he again pulled his stakes and sailed for California. As he again passed Trustees’ Garden, the Savannah Gaslight Company facility is running at maximum output providing gas for cooking, heating, and especially lighting. The shanghai-prone waterfront of his embarkation was a priority for the City and for gas. Wharf lighting was universally embraced in an attempt to stop the epidemic problem of the kidnapping of citizens and drunken sailors that awoke to find themselves aboard ships, miles from home. When Hall entered the Golden Gate of San Francisco Bay on the other side of the continent, he found that three Irish immigrants, the Donohue brothers, had built gasworks there as well. Their venture formed the first manufactured gas company on the West Coast using imported Australian coal to fire the ovens. San Francisco, like Savannah, was growing.
In two years, Matthew Hall McAllister left his impression on his new home and became revered in San Francisco’s history. Few know of his connection to Savannah and his family history in the east. That historical mark was made when he was named the first judge of the Federal Ninth Circuit Count. His likeness is now enshrined in a bronze sculpture that stands near the front steps of San Francisco’s City Hall. A few yards away is a statue commemorating Abraham Lincoln. During the first year as a Federal Judge, he would meet and work with a young banker and Major-General of the California State Militia. They would help put down the San Francisco Vigilance Committee, a group of revolutionary elites formed to defy the law and take power in the city. The young banker-general would visit Hall’s hometown a few years later. Generations will remember and revile the day when William Tecumseh Sherman marched across Georgia and came to town.
Bibliography
Survey of footing-soil stratification at Trustees’ Garden, J Byous Company/A.T. Dowd Research, 2015.
Remediation of Former Manufactured Gas Plants and Other Coal-Tar Sites, Allen W. Hathaway, CRC Press, 2012.
The Story of the Ninth Circuit Court, San Francisco Call, Volume 78, Number 35, 5 July 1895.
Law in the West, edited by Gordon Morris Bakken, Brenda Farrington, Garland Publishing, 2000.
Filed under History, Uncategorized
Oglethorpe’s tree-fronted home is shown at the right on the northeast edge of Old Palace Yard.
He lived halfway between Heaven and Hell, Georgia founder James Edward Oglethorpe. His front steps on London’s St. Margaret Lane were downwind of the King’s fish yard that occupied a courtyard that opened a few houses to his right. The subsequent air often fogged his parlor and bedrooms with acrid, pungent punctuated smells that mixed with the sounds of morning-barking fishmongers, street merchants, and neighborhood workers. Around them, the clatter of knocking, squeaking wagons and carts rolled along the lane, bouncing over sparsely patched islands of free-stone pavers that dotted the long-furrowed thoroughfare.
At the far end of the market behind the rows of salmon, trout, and eel-laden stalls was the location of Hell, an eatery and watering hole once frequented by poet Ben Johnson and ridiculed by diarist Sir William Pepys. The main entrance lured its customers down a stairway from the interior of Westminster Hall the way hookers call salesmen from an Amsterdam window — liquor lubricates opposition tongues. It was known for being a “petty-tavern,” a gathering spot frequented by parliament’s lowly law clerks who boozed in a basement hollow that once housed the Kings’ torture chamber, thus warranting the Hadean label.
The Old and New Palace yards with Oglethorpe’s home marked with the red dot.
According to Pepys, the tavern was a “resort of disreputable characters and the most raffish of lawyers’ clerks.” South, across the street to left of Oglethorpe’s house was Heaven, a more, but little more, up-scale tavern in a line of ramshackle brick and Tudor buildings running from west to east. They blocked his view of the greater part of the Old Palace Yard like listing and leaning hung-over sailors lined across a deck of an outbound schooner.
From there a few feet to the left and diagonally across the lane was another tavern, the Naked Boy and Star, which held the ground beside Westminster Abbey. It served a slightly-more upscale clientele, Members of Parliament, poets, businessmen, lobbyists, and the occasional well-known Londoner. Other Taverns in the area carried the trend with the names, Purgatory and Paradise. A few doors away from the Star, at the corner of the Abbey, Geoffrey Chaucer had once lived in an upstairs flat near “The Poet’s Corner” where he was later interred.
Stepping from his portico, Oglethorpe’s route was “incommodious” as writer Henry Miles penned, noting that the lane in front of his home had “a paling of four feet high… placed between its single footpath and the carriageway, to protect the passenger from the carriages and the mud which they splashed on all sides in abundance.” The wealthy in London, like everyone else, existed in a world of noise, foul smells, dust, mud, filth, and strewn garbage. James held that rank in society — wealthy.
– Excerpt from an upcoming book by JD Byous
Sources
William Maitland et al, The History and Survey of London From Its Foundation to the Present Time: in Two Volumes, Book II, 1756, p 793: Rev. Mackenzie E. C. Walcott, M.A., Memorials of Westminster the City, Royal Palaces, Houses of Parliament, Whitehall, St. Peters’s College, the Parish Churches, Worthies, Streets, Modern Buildings, and Ancient Institutions, 1851, p 221.
Henry Downes Miles, The Life of Richard Palmer: Better Known as Dick Turpin…, London, p 79, 1839.
John Thomas Smith, Antiquities of the City of Westminster, London, 1807 p 68; Henry Downes Miles, The Life of Richard Palmer Better Known as Dick Turpin the Notorious Highwayman and Robber, 1839 p 79.
Henry Miles, The Life of Richard Palmer, London, p 78, 1839.
Filed under History, Uncategorized
It was a great morning, predawn with a chance to relax and wait for the photo to cook. At least that’s what it feels like – baking an image. Use the recipe. Wait for the clock. I had been planning this shot for weeks. Tybee Island, Georgia’s North Beach is the perfect place; tranquil, cool, quiet, and a great jetty for creating wispy, foggy waves in long-exposure images. Over the exposure the waves “stack” and create the illusion of fog, ice, or in some cases, glass. The sea looks as if a fog machine has pumped its haze across the surface leaving stationery items like rocks, poles, sharp. Everything is peaceful as I push the shutter button. Small waves split as they reached the rocks. The occasional large swell crashes into the granite quay sending salt-water sheets into the air… but only a few inches or feet. The calming scent of salt and seawater drifts by.
The Beckster’s Pelican and Shrimp Boat at Sunrise photo. I’m jealous, still.
The ocean is relatively calm on this edge of the Atlantic. Seabirds fly over. Some land and peck the sand searching for a sea-washed breakfast morsel. Others fly on toward Hilton Head Island across the sound. A pelican roosts on a marker pole several-dozen yards out in the water. At low tide, the wooden perch stands high and dry. At all times of the tide, it welcomes winged visitors, usually pelicans and maybe this same bird. It’s worth a photograph, but The Beckster beat me to the best one several years earlier. She, Kate and Tare, our granddaughters, play in the sand a few yards away. She gets shots when I’m not looking. She did back then too.
While shooting a small wedding at sunrise I noticed she was missing. She had spotted the photo unrelated to the bride and groom, ditched us and went for it. I’ve been jealous ever since that time. The sun had lifted from the edge of a cloud bank just above the water and was directly behind the bird. In the distance, a shrimp boat headed to deeper water, in just the right compositional place. It’s a great shot and I give her the best compliment that any photographer can give another, “I wish I had taken that one.” Leaving the wedding, however? She can get away with it. She’s The Beckster.
The test shot of the jetty and pelican before sunrise. 60-second exposure at f11. I like it so I kept it.
This morning the old bird sits in the same spot, in the same position. But that’s not why I’m here. I’m here for long exposures and I haven’t made one in years… thirty-five years. Back then I had a Toyo 4×5″ view camera that I carried to the bottom of a canyon to capture the North Fork of the Tuolumne River near Twain Harte, California.
A photo of me by The Beckster as I shoot the pre-dawn test images. She’s sneaky, but then, she’s The Beckster.
Long black and white exposures were not a problem in the shadow of the surrounding mountains. The extended shutter opening captured the flowing stream as if it were ribbons of glass. One second, two, three, four, I counted off the time. Around four shots and I’m finished. Sheet film isn’t cheap. It wasn’t then either. Afterward, I developed and printed my favorite image and painstakingly oil tinted two. One went to my Uncle Roy in Savannah. It was a Christmas present. The other I kept. Over the years mine was destroyed while in storage. Then later, sadly, my friend and uncle died. The photo stayed with aunt Dot, his wife, until her death. Now I have it back. I cherish the copy and the memories that it represents.
This is the image I made in 1982. It took a bit more effort and I love it. But, boy, do I love digital!
Those cameras take more thought and preparation. But today I still go down the checklist. Tripod? Check. Filters? Check. Correct lenses? Check. Oh, yeah. Camera? Check. Now, find the exposure and wait for the sun. I have the filters that cut light, ND16 and ND8 stacked in front of the lens. Boy, I love digital. Good black and white images can’t be beaten. But I do love the ease of computer-aided photography.
The jetty and pelican as the sun breaks above the horizon, the color version.
I compose the image. What’s the exposure? It’s time. The sun should be coming up, but I need a test. I take one shot. It’s overexposed so I stop the lens down to a smaller aperture to cut down the light. Snap again. One-minute exposure at f11. Got it.
The first one is perfect. All of the images made are perfect. Did I say I love digital?
Not bad for thirty-five years in long-exposure hibernation.
Now the dilemma. Which one… and… color or black and white?
Leave a note below or email me and tell me your think.
– Jim
Visit our main website at SoutheasternBound.net. We post history/travel every Tuesday, then occasional photos/photo tips on Thursday. Please click the Follow button (right) for updates on Southeastern Bound.
© J.D. Byous 2018, All rights reserved.
Filed under nature, photography, travel, Travel Photography, Uncategorized
The History of the Trustees’ Garden
The 1853 Gas Works Wall at Trustees’ Garden is often mistaken for “Old Fort Wayne.” Studies find that it is partially… very partially… true.
Historians and archaeologists uncovered a wealth of military and industrial history on the grounds and in the buildings situated on an historic bluff overlooking the Savannah River.
The surface is rough and scratches at my fingertips as I run them along the plane of fire-hardened bricks. A faint-but-pungent scent of coal tar wafts from the walls that have been forgotten and misinterpreted for generations. In sequence, seven earthen fortifications stood here through the years. There is nothing left of them today – or so many historians believe. But here is the evidence: a small section of one fortification did survive, undetected by decades of history buffs and connoisseurs of the past.
This remnant of an earlier Savannah is old. Well, “old” by the youngest-of-the-thirteen-colonies benchmark. Hidden in plain sight for a century and a half, the now sandy-brown wall reflects the morning light through a narrow archway. A few yards away sleepy commuters navigate past, their vehicles climbing the road-grade beside the city’s legendary Trustees’ Garden. If a piece of land could be a movie character, Savannah’s Trustees’ Garden would be Forrest Gump. Always in the background, excluded and ignored.
But like the character portrayed by Tom Hanks, the site holds secrets of which the bus-stop folks know little. The Garden’s ten-acre plot of sloping ground has, as some say, “more history per square foot than any other spot in the city.” And, I like to think, possibly in the southeast. I love and study history. Never have I seen one small plot of land with so many significant and overlapping historical characteristics. The Trustees’ Garden was planned in 1732 when Georgia’s founder, James Edward Oglethorpe, enlisted the help of John Pine, an English artist, and engraver. The two of them conferred and drew a plan for rows, rank, and file for mulberry, orange, peach and other trees and then inked the lot lines for the rest of the town.
When the settlers arrived in 1733 Oglethorpe staked-out the garden and had it planted the following spring. The garden itself lasted less than two decades. In historical records, the area is always an afterthought — a footnote. Life and history are like that. Who knew this chocolate-history-bonbon in a box held so many hidden treats and treasures? You never know what you’re gonna get. The land has changed hands many times over the years. Early on, the profits expected by the Trustees failed to blossom, so the title was passed to former Royal Governors, then to industrialists, and eventually to hotel developers. The current owner, Charles H. Morris, initiated a shift toward the preservation of the Garden’s rich history. The renovation and historical inspection of the site is slowly revealed forgotten stories that seem to peel away, like the layers of a Vidalia onion.
A historian in his own right, Morris took his time with the renovation. “I want to get it done right,” he said. “I want to make sure we think it through.” The Garden’s northernmost section, alongside the Savannah River, has long been known as a strategic military location. Over the years, military leaders fortified the bluff to provide protection against enemy ships that might sail up the river from the Atlantic.
Earthen fortifications were built on the site when hostilities seemed imminent. Then, as each war or threat of war ended, each successive fortification fell into ruin. Dirt is easy enough to move, so for each new conflict, the battlement-du-jour was staked and excavated in accordance with the newest defensive plan. The soil from the dry moats was “thrown up” to the inner line to create the parapets… time after time, fortification after fortification. At least seven battlements have stood on this site, beginning with colonial times and extending through the Civil War, when the last fort anchored the Union Army’s line on what was then the terrace of the Savannah Manufactured Gas Works.
In order the seven were; Oglethorpe’s fort, built circa 1740, Fort Halifax, circa 1759, Fort Savannah, 1778, British cannon emplacements employed during the Siege of Savannah 1779, Fort Prevost, 1780, Fort Wayne, 1813, and the Union fortifications in 1865. There is evidence that there may have been additional fortifications as well, but that is yet to be determined. An interesting legend surrounds the brick wall that currently stands watch over the river at the location of the recently discovered Revolutionary War-era structure. Guide books refer to the wall as part of “Old Fort Wayne.”
Many historians do the same. The confusion is justified. The building of the wall in 1853 destroyed the older fort that was the namesake of General “Mad” Anthony Wayne. The older earthen ramparts were shoveled into the interior of the wall to create a terrace for gasholders. Workers unearthed old cannons that they placed along the wall, making it look like an old fort to generations of Savannahians.
Everybody in town knew that the fort had been located on that spot. After all, the cannons were there to prove it. Fort Halifax, the second on the bluff, was built in 1759. It was a tender spot and tinder box during the days leading up to the American Revolution. In December 1765 the “obnoxious” stamps that represented taxation by the Crown were stored at the fort. Royal Governor James Wright placed the stamps there for protection against the local Sons of Liberty, who vowed to burn them. Fifty-five Royal Rangers under the leadership of the Governor and Captain John Milledge stood guard. Nearby, 200 angry Patriots awaited an opportunity to strike a blow for liberty. Wright had the stamps moved by ship to Cockspur Island at the mouth of the river, thus defusing the matter, at least for awhile.
And that’s only a partial history of the site. I’ll post more later.
– JD Byous
Looking east from the location of the ancient powder magazine.
Filed under Uncategorized
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To some, the glow of the moon inspires. A glowing sunset beckons along the beach then fades slowly into the night. So starts my obsession to find the holey grail – the perfect doughnut. Not just glazed, or sprinkled or custard-filled, but the best. For me, it’s the neon moon – the yellow-orange, heart-stopping-full-of-love-and-warmth beacon that cries “HOT NOW” wrapped around those savory words, “Krispy Kreme”. THE electric moon. The siren song of pulsing neon. The lady of the evening calling, “Hey sailor!” – hanging, winking at the vulnerable passing by. It grips the lobes of the brain like the talon-gripped digits of a Yankee tourist on a Paula Deen pork chop. There are other kingdoms our city, Savannah, Georgia. Other vistas of white, sugar-glazed ridges… of golden brown islands floating in a sea of grease… of golden maple plains that crank a glucometer like a tac on a 450 supercharged engine. The best of the best… if there is such a thing to be found. Yes, Krispy Kreme is king. Later in the evening with the after-glow of heartburn, a Tums or two comforts as I’m tucked into my warm bed, visions of floating circles in mirror-rippled grease. My grin is steadfast. I fade into peaceful slumber.
But I awake… all a dream. Gluten intolerant. I cry myself back to sleep.
The siren sign. The solicitor of more pedestrians and drivers than… well… nevermind.
Filed under Uncategorized
History By GPS 