The Pirate’s House: Savannah’s Oldest Building Has a Wilder History Than You Think

Let me tell you about a building that has been, at various points in its history, a tavern, a sailors’ boardinghouse, an alleged press-ganging operation, a tunnel hub, a restaurant, and — according to Robert Louis Stevenson, maybe — the inspiration for a chapter of Treasure Island.

The Pirate’s House. 1734. Savannah’s oldest surviving structure, tucked on East Broad Street in a spot that most tourists drive past without realizing what they’re looking at.

What it actually was

The original building was constructed as a herb garden and keeper’s house for the Trustees’ Garden — the first public agricultural experimental garden in America, established one year after Savannah’s founding. The goal was to figure out what crops could be cultivated in Georgia’s climate. Mulberry trees for silk production. Medicinal plants. Grapes. Most of it failed. The land eventually transitioned to other uses, and the keeper’s house became a tavern serving the rough waterfront trade.

And “rough” is the operative word. The Savannah waterfront in the 18th and early 19th centuries was genuinely dangerous territory — the kind of place where a sailor could have a drink and wake up on a ship heading to the East Indies with no clear memory of how he got there.

The tunnels

The Pirate’s House has tunnels. This is documented. They connected to the riverfront and were almost certainly used to move goods — and possibly people — without the inconvenience of doing so in the open. Press-ganging — the practice of forcibly conscripting sailors — was common in this era, and a network of tunnels from a waterfront tavern to the docks would have been a remarkably convenient infrastructure for it.

The tunnels are no longer accessible to visitors, but they’re real. The building sitting above them is real. The history embedded in those walls is real.

The Stevenson connection

The claim that Robert Louis Stevenson visited Savannah and used the Pirate’s House as inspiration for Treasure Island is… disputed. The dates don’t quite work the way the story suggests. But it’s the kind of claim that gets repeated because the building is exactly what you’d imagine if you were going to invent a place called the Pirate’s House.

Whether or not Stevenson ever set foot in it, the building earns its name entirely on its own merits. Go have dinner there. Look at the old sections of the building — the original 1754 seamen’s house room in particular. Touch the walls. That’s almost 300 years of Savannah’s most unruly history under your hands.