Savannah

Savannah's structure is its history. The Savannah Historic District, a National Historic Landmark District, is shaped directly by James Oglethorpe's original town plan — its linked squares, shaded streets and exceptional concentration of 18th- and 19th-century architecture are treated as one connected district rather than a list of individual buildings; the squares themselves are public, while the houses, churches and museums around them set their own access rules. That architecture cannot be told honestly without the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters, where a major Regency house and its surviving urban slave quarters are interpreted together, deliberately examining the site's architecture through the lives of both the wealthy family who owned it and the enslaved people who occupied it and kept it running. A different, earlier layer of colonial Georgia is preserved at Wormsloe State Historic Site, the estate of Noble Jones, one of the colony's original 1733 settlers; alongside its well-known oak-lined entrance avenue, the site holds the tabby ruins of Jones's fortified home and a museum covering early colonial Georgia life. Bonaventure Cemetery closes the picture with a different kind of history entirely: an active river-bluff municipal cemetery on the site of the former Bonaventure Plantation, known for its live-oak avenues and funerary sculpture, and for the layered histories of the people actually buried there — a place that asks to be visited during posted hours with the same respect any working cemetery deserves, not treated as a backdrop for entertainment.