“Like a beautiful maiden too bashful to reveal her charms, she has hitherto hidden them from our view. But now that we have unveiled them, they fascinate us even to idolatry.” 1
An 1840 St. Patrick’s Day toast to Savannah from a recent Irish immigrant.
In February 1733, founder James Oglethorpe wrote his fellow Trustees in England that the site for the new Georgia Colony was, “[A] healthy situation about ten miles from the sea. The river there forms a half moon, along the South side of which the banks are about 40 foot high and upon the top a flat which they call a bluff. The plain high ground extends into the country five or six miles and along the riverside about a mile.”
Thirty-five families founded Savannah, and laid out the town in a beautiful and functional grid pattern accentuated by its famous central squares. All religions were welcome except Catholics, primarily out of concern that their loyalties might lean toward then Spanish-Catholic Florida. Georgia’s charter initially banned lawyers, slavery, and liquor as well. Within twenty years each of the four was common, if not prevalent.
“It is true that the charter prohibited Catholic worship. But Oglethorpe, the son of Catholic parents, regarded with benevolence the presence in his colony of adherents of the “Old Religion.” They came in spite of the restraints imposed upon them by the penal laws and gained positions of trust.”2
During the Revolutionary War, Catholics “had the consolation of attending Masses celebrated by French chaplains when the city was held by the British and besieged by French and American forces.” Polish ally Count Casimir Pulaski reportedly uttered “Jesus, Maria, Joseph” upon being mortally wounded during the 1779 siege. He is honored by a 55-foot tall monument in Savannah’s Monterey Square.
The first priest arrived in 1793, and in 1801 a small wooden chapel was built and dedicated to the patronage of St. John the Baptist. In the 1820s and 30s “a substantial brick church was built on Drayton Street, and several schools under Catholic auspices were founded.” In 1845, six sisters of Our Lady of Mercy arrived and opened St. Vincent’s Academy on Liberty Street. In the 1840s the great potato famines brought hundreds more Irish-Catholics to Savannah, so many that in 1850 nearly one in every five citizens of Savannah was Irish-born.2 In addition to their parish of St. John, then the only Catholic church in Georgia and thus the cathedral for new diocese, most of these Irish-Catholics found society and support in the Hibernian Society and the Irish Jasper Greens militia, and found employment at the new Central of Georgia Railroad, completed in 1847.
In 1875 the Sisters of Mercy began administering St. Joseph’s Infirmary on East Taylor Street, while a new Cathedral of St. John was built on Lafayette Square while St. Patrick’s, “a handsome parish church,” was constructed on West Broad Street. As thousands of parishioners watched helplessly, on Sunday evening Feb. 6, 1898 a fire destroyed the Cathedral. Only the brick walls and its iconic bell-tower spires remained. The Cathedral was quickly rebuilt through the generosity of benefactors like Capt. John Flannery, an Irish born banker and cotton merchant. To this day its historic twin spires stand as a sentinel above Lafayette Square, and its bells continue to ring on the hour and half hour as a symbol of the rich Catholic heritage of Savannah.
Adapted from A String of Bells: Stories of a Southern Family © 2020 by Nick J. Guevara, Jr.
1 Savannah, A History of Her People Since 1733 © 1992 by Preston Russell and Barbara Hines pg 170, 173
2 Unless otherwise noted, quotes and many of the facts cited come from “Catholics Were Among The Earliest Georgia Settlers” by Walter C. Hartridge, The Savannah Bulletin February 22, 1958. pg 1, 8
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