showing the first six squares. The
Savannah River and "north" are to the bottom of the image. In addition to the first four squares—
Johnson,
Wright, St. James (
Telfair) and
Ellis—this map also shows the later-constructed
Reynolds and
Oglethorpe Squares. The city of Savannah was founded in 1733 by General
James Oglethorpe. Although cherished by many today for their aesthetic beauty, the first squares were originally intended to provide colonists space for practical reasons such as militia training exercises. The original plan resembles the layout of contemporary military camps, which were likely quite familiar to General Oglethorpe. The layout was also a reaction against the cramped conditions that fueled the
Great Fire of London in 1666. A square was established for each ward of the new city. The first four squares were named
Johnson,
Percival (now Wright),
Decker (now Ellis) and
St. James (now Telfair), and they formed a larger square on the bluff overlooking the
Savannah River. The original plan actually called for
six squares, and as the city grew the grid of wards and squares was extended so that 33 squares were eventually created on a five-by-two-hundred grid. (Two points on this grid were occupied by
Colonial Park Cemetery, established in 1750, and four others—in the southern corners of the downtown area—were never developed with squares.) When the city began to expand south of
Gaston Street, the grid of squares was abandoned and
Forsyth Park was allowed to serve as a single, centralized park for that area. All of the squares measure approximately from east to west, but they vary north to south from approximately 100 to . Typically, each square is intersected north-south and east-west by wide, two-way streets. They are bounded to the west and east by the south- and north-bound lanes of the intersecting north-south street, and to the north and south by smaller one-way streets running east-to-west and west-to-east, respectively. As a result, traffic flows one way—counterclockwise—around the squares, which thus function much like traffic circles. Each square sits (or, in some cases,
sat) at the center of a ward, which often shares its name with its square. The lots to the east and west of the squares, flanking the major east-west axis, were considered "trust lots" in the original city plan and intended for large public buildings such as churches, schools, or markets. The remainder of the ward was divided into four areas, called
tithings, each of which was further divided into ten residential lots. The five squares along
Bull Street—
Monterey,
Madison,
Chippewa,
Wright, and
Johnson—were intended to be grand monument spaces and have been called Savannah's "Crown Jewels." Many of the other squares were designed more simply as commons or parks, although most serve as memorials as well. Architect John Massengale has called Savannah's city plan "the most intelligent grid in America, perhaps the world", and
Edmund Bacon wrote that "it remains as one of the finest diagrams for city organization and growth in existence." The
American Society of Civil Engineers has honored Oglethorpe's plan for Savannah as a
National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, and in 1994 the plan was nominated for inclusion in the
UNESCO World Heritage List. The squares are a major point of interest for millions of tourists visiting Savannah each year, and they have been credited with stabilizing once-deteriorating neighborhoods and revitalizing Savannah's downtown commercial district. ==First four squares, 1733==