Bonaventure Cemetery: Savannah's Most Beautiful Resting Place

Bonaventure Cemetery is located on the eastern edge of the city of Savannah on a bluff overlooking the Wilmington River. The cemetery can be reached from U.S. Highway 80, which is accessible from Interstates 16 and 516. Bonaventure is a cultural and historical landmark for Savannah and all of Georgia. The cemetery is the setting for part of the novel and movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. In 2001, the cemetery was listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Bonaventure's allure as a tourist destination comes from its beauty as much as its historic significance. The cemetery is planted with live oaks, which line and arch over the roadways, hanging with Spanish moss. The river and marshes along its eastern border provide beautiful scenery for a walk. Then there are the graves themselves, adorned with hauntingly lovely sculptures that make for excellent photography in the shade of the oaks as well as inspire legends about their origins.

The cemetery began as the estate and family cemetery for the Tattnalls, who were descended from the original owners of the land, the Mullrynes. The Mullrynes settled there in 1762, and it was Colonel Mullryne who planted the original oaks, some of which remain on the property. The estate was a significant site during the American Revolution, but by 1817 it was uninhabited. In 1847, it was developed as a private cemetery and, in 1907, was sold to the City of Savannah.

Many figures of historical and cultural significance are buried in Bonaventure, including numerous Georgia politicians, soldiers and civic leaders. Johnny Mercer, the composer of such pop classics as "Moon River'' and "Accentuate the Positive'' lies in Bonaventure. Visitors to his grave are encouraged to sit on the bench a while and leave a penny when they go. Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Conrad Aiken and his wife, artist Mary Hoover Aiken, also rest in the cemetery.

The most famous residents of Bonaventure, however, are the statues. "Little Gracie'' is the lifelike representation of Grace Watson, a little girl who died in 1889 at the age of six. Her family was well-known, and the whole city mourned her death. John Walz, who later sculpted many of the city's monuments, copied Grace's image from a photograph a few years after her death. Visitors often leave donations or memorials with Little Gracie. Another statue, Corinne, is of a woman who threw herself into a nearby creek and drowned, disconsolate over a love affair. The most famous stone image of Bonaventure, however, is no longer there. Visitors looking for the "Bird Girl,'' portrayed on the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, will need to go downtown to the Telfair Museum, where she was moved for safekeeping after the book became so popular.

Reviews of Bonaventure Cemetery on a well-known travel website are overwhelmingly positive. The natural beauty of the site combined with the mystery and legends that accompany its residents almost never fail to charm. It is called "quite serene with its stone gardens and trees dripping with Spanish moss,'' and "the most beautiful and enchanting cemetery I have ever seen.'' Some visitors warn that valuables may be stolen from vehicles, but many others counter that the cemetery is a very comfortable place to walk and take photographs. Precautions should be taken with valuables just as with any other urban location. Perhaps the loveliest and most accurate review of Bonaventure came from naturalist John Muir, who spent six nights in the cemetery on his walk from Indiana to Florida in 1867:

"I gazed awe-stricken as one new-arrived from another world. Bonaventure is called a graveyard, a town of the dead, but the few graves are powerless in such a depth of life. The rippling of living waters, the song of birds, the joyous confidence of flowers, the calm, undisturbable grandeur of the oaks, mark this place of graves as one of the Lord's most favored abodes of life and light.''