Bonaventure Cemetery, Savannah

Two years ago, Mike and I spent hours at Colonial Park cemetery in downtown Savannah. It's one of the oldest and largest in that great city. The stories it tells directly and indirectly are fascinating. Since then, thanks to my friend Laura, I heard of the far bigger and slightly older Bonaventure Cemetery on the eastern edge of the city.

There is a comprehensive grave site locator newly available for this rambling and peaceful resting place. A nice staff person in the visitors' center there gave us a lot of information for the cemetery and for the next stage of our trip. We mentioned we were going to Charleston next. She was born and grew up there. (Charleston and Savannah have a bit of a rivalry, so normally we wouldn't have gotten much helpful info in Savannah about Charleston. We've come across a few other such competitive areas. GA vs SC and SC vs NC to mention a couple of obvious ones. One not so obvious is western NC vs the rest of NC. It makes a little sense if you look at it on the map, but still it's so well established that WNC is seemingly understood everywhere down here.) Then when the woman staffer learned we are from VT, she reacted because her husband graduated from the first class of Vermont Law School.

We also learned from her the two most popular grave sites: One, a little girl named Gracie who died around 1900 at six years old. Her father had run a large hotel in Savannah. She was well known for running around the lobby bringing smiles to all. Her site is so popular that it had to be fenced off and restored due to excess wear and tear. The other is the grave of songwriter Johnny Mercer (many songs us old guys know -- Autumn Leaves, Moon River ...).

Lastly, before the photos, we walked around for about an hour with a quiet spoken veteran who lived next door to the cemetery for many years. He'd walked miles every day for years in this beautiful place where some of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was filmed. He told us back stories on a lot of the graves and pointed out some we never would have seen, hidden by the way the cemetery is laid out. He also told us of his research into Gracie and her family. Her parents were devastated by the loss and her father went to NYC to manage a big hotel there after Gracie died. Our "tour guide" walking his Old English Bulldog said he has been trying to find out if she had any siblings. No luck yet. He said that every year around Christmas Gracie's grave site is covered with new toys.

The angel holding a shell above is near the Mercer grave, but well hidden.