Cheesy Grits: The First Visit to Savannah

Savannah had never been on our travel radar before. Jane has long been a baseball fan and wanted to go to spring training in Florida, so one spring, we packed our bags into our car, drove our car to the Auto Train and headed south, with the intention of taking in a baseball game or two and then making our way slowly back north by car—with a stop in Savannah, of course.

Amtrak's Auto-Train passing through Georgia. The
rail cars loaded with automobiles are attached
to the rear of the train.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Herewith an unsolicited testimonial for the Auto Train, which runs between northern Virginia and central Florida: you pack your car to the gills and drive to Lorton, VA, where your fully-loaded car is then loaded onto an auto-transport rail car attached to the same train that you will ride to Sanford, Florida.

The train leaves Lorton around 4:30 in the afternoon, headed for Sanford. Non-stop. Dinner and a continental breakfast are included. When you get to Sanford, you get off the train and wait in the waiting room while your car is driven off the auto-transport rail car, and when it pulls up, you hop in and drive away with a car full of stuff you couldn't have hoped to take with you on an airplane. This counts for something when you're traveling with a toddler, which Jake was at the time.

We splurged, relatively speaking, and got a roomette, so we didn't have to spend the night in reclining seats in coach. One of the neat thing about the Auto Train in the spring is that the heavy, "snow-bird" traffic is headed north, so Amtrak sometimes offers deeply-discounted fares for south-bound travelers during that time. Jane, being the champion shopper that she is, had latched onto one of those fairly early.

So, having seen the Mets play in Port St. Lucie, we headed north to spend our first north-bound night in Savannah.

Being novice family historians, Yankees, and all sort of other things, we were basically unprepared to really see Savannah or make the best use of the resources there. Fortunately for us, Savannah greets her visitors with gracious beauty. For instance, there's Forsyth Park, pictured below. It sits towards the southern end of the historic section of Savannah, and has wonderful walkways with live oaks draped with curtains of Spanish moss hanging over your head. The fountain you see in the photo below is the centerpiece of the park, and it is just dazzling. The park also has a large playground, where our Jake was content to play for a while

The fountain in Forsyth Park, Savannah, Ga.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons

The historic section of the city is laid out in a series of squares with the main streets connecting the squares. Each square acts as a sort of neighborhood center, and sitting in the middle of major thoroughfares as they do, also slows down automobile traffic considerably, as you have to negotiate around each square and then proceed a few blocks to the next square, where you do the square dance again. But they're all tree-filled parks now and are wonderful things to have in the middle of a city.

One might say that the slowing down of traffic that the squares do has indeed helped the old city stay what it is. Savannah is quite happy being Savannah; it isn't in a hurry to be something else or get somewhere else—at least until you get further out from city center where the strip malls and divided highways are.

The northern end of the historic district is bounded by the Savannah River, and indeed, Savannah has been mostly known as a port city. The port itself sits on a long shelf that is about forty feet below the street level of the historic district. From Bay Street, you can look down onto the shelf and the river, and it's easy to imagine a busy river port. While we were there, the British royal yacht Britannia was tied up at a dock, paying a courtesy call. There were no royals on board; she was just out for a proverbial spin, so that her crew could keep their skills shipshape.

As I said, we were novices in doing family history when we were first visited Savannah. We did manage to spend some time in the Local History Reading Room at the Bull Street Main Library of the Live Oak Libraries, and there we added a few more factoids to our knowledge of Jane's great-grandfather, George Ralston. He worked mostly on the docks for shipping companies. Sometimes in skilled positions such as barrel-making, as was noted in the 1900 census, and other times as a dockhand, presumably loading and unloading ship cargo.

We also found the address where Great-grandfather George Ralston was recorded as living at time of the 1910 census: 625 E. Broad. I took a picture: that's it to the right. (I don't remember why we didn't try to track down the address where the family, still together, was living at the time of the 1900 census: 519 Herndon Lane.)

Of course, a house is just a building. What makes it a home is the history of the building, the neighborhood that surrounds it, and the people who lived in it. Who were the Ralstons? Who were their neighbors? Why did they live at these addresses rather than somewhere else in Savannah? Answering those questions requires someone who knows the social history of Savannah and her neighborhoods intimately. That someone wasn't us, as we could still barely find our way from one side of the city to the other. I should also note that this was right around the time that John Berendt published Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which really brought Savannah's beauty—and her secrets—to view. (A confession: we didn't get around to reading it until years after it was published, and regretted that we waited so long. So far as we can tell, none of the characters in it are related to Jane's family.)

But at least we had made a start in Savannah. We wouldn't take another step on this part of the journey until many years later, although our journeys in New York and then South Carolina would continue.

As I mentioned earlier,  we did locate Grandfather George in New York in 1920, and when we found him, we found the beginnings of the answer to one of our most pressing questions: who was Jane's grandmother?