Yamacraw Bluff
Savannah, Chatham County, Georgia
Marker Inscription
This is Yamacraw Bluff where the Colony of Georgia was founded, February 12, 1733, by Gen. James Edward Oglethorpe Voted by the Georgia Daughters of the American Revolution The Most Historic Spot in Georgia
The Story
Georgia was the last of Britain's thirteen American colonies, and it began right here. On February 12, 1733, James Oglethorpe and a little over a hundred settlers climbed this high sandy bluff above the Savannah River and laid out the town of Savannah on Oglethorpe's famous grid of open squares. The bluff already had a name and a people: it was home to the Yamacraw, a Creek band whose leader Tomochichi welcomed the newcomers and made the peaceful founding possible. Generations later the Georgia Daughters of the American Revolution set this monument to mark what they called 'the most historic spot in Georgia.'
Why it matters
This bluff is where Georgia was born — the thirteenth and final colony that completed the roster of provinces which would become the original United States.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Step back to the early 1730s. Britain's American colonies ran in a long chain down the Atlantic seaboard, but there was a gap at the southern end — a debatable land between the settled Carolinas and Spanish Florida. Into that gap the Crown chartered one last colony, and the high sandy bluff above the Savannah River is where it began.
Georgia was conceived as something unusual for its time: part military buffer against Spain, part social experiment. Its trustees imagined a place where the "worthy poor" of England might start over, and in its early years they banned slavery and hard liquor and tried to keep landholdings small. Whether those ideals held is another story, but they are the ideas that sailed up this river.
The land itself was not empty. Long before any English keel touched the bank, the bluff was home ground — a place people lived, farmed, and traded. The founding that this monument celebrates happened on the edge of an existing world, not on a blank page.
People & events
On the twelfth of February, 1733, James Oglethorpe led a little band of colonists — a bit more than a hundred souls — up onto this bluff and set about laying out a town. What he laid out became famous: Savannah's orderly grid of streets built around open public squares, a plan so sensible and humane that the city still lives inside it today.
Oglethorpe did not arrive to a welcome that could be taken for granted. The bluff belonged to the Yamacraw, a Creek band, and their leader Tomochichi chose friendship over resistance. That choice made all the difference. A peaceful founding, rather than a bloody one, gave the fragile new settlement room to take root, and Tomochichi became a genuine partner in its early survival — a figure the colonists came to respect deeply.
Generations later, the Daughters of the American Revolution in Georgia set this monument on the spot and gave it a bold claim: the most historic place in the state. It is the kind of pride that grows up around a beginning — the urge to mark the exact ground where everything started.
Its place in the American story
Georgia was the thirteenth colony — the last piece to complete the set of British provinces that would one day declare independence together. When you count out the original states of the new United States, the roster closes here, on this bluff. Without this founding, the familiar thirteen is only twelve.
There is a deeper American thread running through the scene, too. The country's beginnings are almost never the story of newcomers alone; they are the story of newcomers meeting people already here. The friendship between the settlers and Tomochichi's Yamacraw is one of the more hopeful versions of that meeting — a reminder that the early map of America was drawn in cooperation as often as in conflict, even as that balance would tragically tilt in the generations that followed.
Savannah's plan of squares also became a quiet gift to the nation's cities. It is one of the earliest and most admired examples of deliberate town planning in America, studied and copied long after the colonial era ended.
If you visit
Come to the bluff and let the height register first. You are standing on the natural rise that made this spot defensible and desirable — high ground above the Savannah River, the same vantage the first settlers climbed to. The river traffic below you is the modern echo of the water road that brought them.
Then walk the squares. Savannah's grid is not a museum piece; it is a living street plan you can stroll through, square after leafy square, each one a small public room. Reading the monument's confident boast and then wandering the city it launched is the whole experience in miniature — the beginning, and everything that grew from it.
It makes a natural first or last stop on any tour of the Georgia coast. Give yourself time to sit in a square, look toward the water, and think about a February morning when a hundred strangers and the people who already lived here decided to share this ground.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · James Edward Oglethorpe
- · Tomochichi
Related events
- · Founding of the Colony of Georgia (1733)
- · Founding of Savannah
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Bilbo Mound - Oldest Civil Engineering Project in North America
Savannah, GA
Bilbo Mound is an ancient earthwork on the marshy edge of the Savannah River, part of the long story of Native American peoples who shaped this coast centuries before European arrival. Earth and shell mounds like this represent some of the earliest large-scale engineered constructions on the continent, raised by Indigenous communities over generations. The site is a reminder of how deeply, and how early, human hands worked this landscape.
Roger Lacy (Lacey) Historic Marker
Thunderbolt, GA
In 1734, just a year after James Oglethorpe founded Georgia as Britain's thirteenth colony, Roger Lacy arrived in the young settlement of Savannah. He spent much of his time upriver at Augusta, a frontier trading post established to anchor the lucrative deerskin trade with the Creek, Cherokee, and other Native nations of the interior. As both a licensed trader and the post's commander, Lacy occupied the volatile seam where colonial ambition met Indigenous power, a role that demanded diplomacy as much as commerce.
Irish Volunteers
Charleston, SC
This monument honors the Irish Volunteers, a Charleston militia company drawn from the city's Irish immigrant community, whose members answered the call across half a century of American conflict. The inscription traces their service from the War of 1812 through the Florida War of 1835 — part of the long Seminole conflicts — and on into the Civil War, where the unit's men filled the ranks of Confederate companies including Co. K of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers in the Army of Northern Virginia. It stands as a communal tribute raised by Charleston's Irish to their own dead, the kind of ethnic militia company that gave immigrant newcomers a foothold and a sense of belonging in antebellum American cities.
A World Apart / Cracked Earth
Savannah, GA
This memorial stands in Savannah, the coastal Georgia city that sent thousands of its sons to fight in World War II, a conflict that pulled ordinary Chatham County men into battlefields across Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa between 1941 and 1945. Titled "A World Apart," it honors those who never came home — the local cost of a global war fought to halt fascist aggression and defend the freedom of the United States. Coastal Georgia itself was on a wartime footing in these years, with nearby shipyards, airfields, and the ever-present threat of enemy submarines just offshore.