Savannah’s Most Underrated Squares (The Ones Worth Actually Stopping At)

Here’s a confession: I spend almost no time at Chippewa Square anymore. Not because it isn’t historically significant — the James Oglethorpe statue is worth a look, and yes, they filmed the Forrest Gump bus bench scene there — but because Chippewa is where everyone goes. And where everyone goes, the experience gets diluted.

Savannah has 22 squares. Most visitors see four or five. That means seventeen squares are sitting there, relatively undisturbed, holding some of the most interesting history in the city. Let me make the case for the ones you’re probably skipping.

Calhoun Square: The Only One Left Intact

Calhoun Square is the only square in Savannah that still has all four of its original surrounding structures in place — a church, a school, a row of houses, and the surrounding trust and tithing lots exactly as Oglethorpe’s plan intended. Wesleyan Methodist Church anchors the south end. The Massie Heritage Center, Georgia’s oldest operating school building, anchors the north.

There is no fountain. There is no famous statue. There is nothing Instagram-optimized about it. Which is precisely why it’s the most architecturally pure square in the city.

Troup Square: The One With the Armillary Sphere

Most visitors walk past the center monument at Troup Square without knowing what they’re looking at. It’s an armillary sphere — a model of the celestial heavens — an unusual choice for a civic monument in a Southern city, installed in 1951 and one of only a handful in the country.

Troup Square also sits in the middle of what became one of Savannah’s first integrated neighborhoods in the mid-20th century. The history layered into those four blocks is considerably more complex than the monument suggests.

Columbia Square: Wormsloe’s Presence in the City

Columbia Square’s centerpiece is the Wormsloe Fountain — a replica of the well at Wormsloe Plantation, one of the oldest standing structures in Georgia. Having its replica in the center of this quiet residential square creates a direct physical link to the earliest days of the Georgia colony that most tourists never find.

Liberty Square: The One That Disappeared and Came Back

Liberty Square was eliminated in the 1930s to make way for a highway overpass. It was restored in 1981. The fact that Savannah would remove one of Oglethorpe’s original squares for an overpass, then restore it forty years later, tells you something about the complicated relationship this city has with its own history.

The Honest Take

The famous squares deserve their fame. But Savannah’s grid was designed as a complete system — 22 interlocking military parade grounds that became civic spaces that became neighborhood living rooms. To understand what Oglethorpe actually built, you need to walk the ones nobody’s photographing. Pick three you’ve never stopped at. Sit in them. Read the markers. The city gets quieter and more honest the further you get from the tour bus routes.

Experience Savannah In Person

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