Georgetown is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Chatham County, Georgia, United States. The population was 11,916 at the 2020 census. Georgetown lies across the Little Ogeechee River (and city limits) from Savannah, Georgia, and is a suburban "bedroom community" of Savannah, where most of its adult residents work.
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1.5 km
Burroughs is a populated place established as a town in Chatham County, Georgia by former slaves. In 1906, it was described as a post-village near the Ogeechee River about 12 miles southwest of Savannah. It had a population of 118 in 1900. The town was chartered in 1898 and had its charter revoked in 1921. It is now a neighborhood of Savannah.
Burroughs is home to the historic St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church and New Ogeechee Missionary Baptist Church. J. C. Legree was its first mayor. Henry Alexander Saturnin Hartley was a missionary to the area.
The Atlantic Coast Line Railroad passed through Burroughs. There was a Burroughs Station. In 1993 a filing was made to remove a train station stop in Burroughs. The area has artesian wells. There is a Burroughs Neighborhood Park.
1.6 km
Wild Heron is a historic plantation house approximately 15 miles south of Savannah, Georgia. It is one of the oldest domestic structures in Georgia and is a relatively intact example of a typical architectural genre which flourished in coastal Georgia and South Carolina in the eighteenth century. Adding to its significance is its association with Francis Henry Harris and his son, Col. Francis Henry Harris, prominent figures of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras in Georgia, and the operation through two hundred years as a working rice plantation, owned for much of that time by descendants of the same family.
The house was built on a 500-acre tract of land granted to Captain David Cutler Braddock in 1747. Braddock, "allowed to be an excellent seaman, according to the loyal Governor's Council President, James Habersham in 1750", most likely constructed the house between 1752 and 1756 when Braddock was loaned a large sum of money by Francis Harris. The wainscoting, chimneys, and mantels along with its double spraddle roof are all suggestive of an eighteenth-century construction date.
Francis Harris, an English-born accountant, came to Georgia about 1739 to assist Thomas Causton with the trustee accounts. In 1744, Harris became a partner with James Habersham in the commercial firm of Harris and Habersham. Harris was a member of the Royal Governor's Council and the first Speaker of the House of Commons in colonial Georgia. He was married in England about 1754, and tradition holds that his wife, Mary Goodall, was heiress to an estate in Hampshire, England known as Wild Heron, which she sold about the time of her marriage and move to Savannah. Harris abandoned the mercantile trade and became a planter acquiring land on the Little Ogeechee River. He paid 1168 pounds for Braddock's tract, the high price indicating the presence of a house on the property, and the English name was transferred to the American land. The name was contracted, English fashion, to Wild Hern, a name that evolved to Wild Horn; the property was known by that name until research in 1935 discovered the original name of the plantation to be Wild Heron.
Having been granted 1,300 acres in 1762 and purchased another 1,600 acres in the same vicinity, Harris had accrued considerable holdings by 1769. After his death in 1771, his son, Col. Francis Henry Harris, inherited the property. Col. Harris fought in the Revolutionary War until 1781, when he was wounded at Etttaw Springs, dying shortly thereafter at Santee Hills. His sister, Elizabeth Harris MacLeod, inherited the property which passed, in turn, to her son, Francis Henry MacLeod. MacLeod managed the plantation until his death in 1866. He left a large estate was valued at approximately $264,000, including 450 acres planted in rice, 310 acres of rice fields unplanted, 2,000 acres of high lands, 1,000 acres of marshland, and 129 slaves. The slaves and MacLeod's Confederate bonds and notes were of no value, but were included in the appraisal of his estate.
The Ogeechee River District in which Wild Heron was located, was an extension of the great rice planting corridor of the Savannah River. In addition, the extensive high land acreage allowed for the growing of the South's king crop, cotton. When MacLeod died just before the collapse of the Confederacy the so-called "Settlement Tract," on which the house was located, was a legacy to his son, Richard, who, followed by his descendants, owned it through the difficult intervening years until Shelby Myrick, Sr., purchased it in 1935. The Myrick family accomplished a careful restoration of the house, which retains its eighteenth-century character as well as its structure.
Wild Heron was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. It is the oldest plantation house in Savannah and one of the oldest houses in Georgia.
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Lebanon Plantation is a Private historic site located at 5745 Ogeechee Road in Savannah, Georgia. The site is over 500 acres consisting of a large estate granted to James Deveaux in 1756, and was named for the many cedar trees on the property. An additional 500 acres were granted to Phillip Delegal in 1758 and eventually became part of the plantation. The site was purchased by Joseph Habersham in 1802. Habersham sold it in 1804 to George W. Anderson who built the main house that was rebuilt and added on to after the American Civil War. Anderson's son, George Wayne Anderson, JR Commanded Fort McAllister in the Civil War, and after the fort fell, Lebanon became his prison and the headquarters of the Fifteenth Army Corps of the US Army.
After occupation, the main house at Lebanon was partially destroyed, and foreclosed upon in 1868. It was recovered by George W. Anderson in 1871. The extent of the damage to the original house is not known, but was rebuilt and repaired by April 23, 1873. Anderson later divided the property and allowed French immigrants to form a colony called L'Esperance. They planted and cultivated vineyards that did not succeed. In 1916, Savannah's Mills Bee Lane, father of the city's preservationist Mary Lane Morrison, purchased the plantation from the Anderson family heirs, and grew a new variety of orange, called the Savannah Satsuma. It was later owned by Morrison's son, Howard J. Morrison Jr., and his wife, Mary Reynolds Morrison, the third generation of the Lane–Morrison family to continuously own the property.
Lebanon remains a working plantation today, much in the same manner it has for over two centuries and is private not open to the public.
4.2 km
Coastal Georgia Botanical Gardens is a former USDA plant-introduction station that has developed into a public 51-acre multipurpose farm and green space. It is located is Chatham County, Georgia, south of Savannah.
4.3 km
Henderson is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Chatham County, Georgia, United States. The population was 2,178 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Savannah metropolitan statistical area.
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Georgetown, Chatham County, Georgia
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It is part of the Savannah Metropolitan Statistical Area. Georgetown was constructed mostly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but new subdivisions have been built recently. Shopping facilities are now more plentiful and continue to be added. Two schools in Georgetown are units of the Savannah-Chatham public school system: Georgetown Elementary and Southwest Middle School. Georgetown's public high school students attend Windsor Forest High School in Savannah.