The Savannah Historic District is a large urban U.S. historic district that roughly corresponds to the pre-civil war city limits of Savannah, Georgia. The area was declared a National Historic Landmark District in 1966, and is one of the largest urban, community-wide historic preservation districts in the United States.

The district was made in recognition of the Oglethorpe Plan, a unique sort of urban planning begun by James Oglethorpe at the city’s founding and propagated for the first century of its growth. The plan of the historic portions of Savannah is based on the concept of a ward, as defined by James Oglethorpe.

Each ward had a central square, around which were arrayed four trust lots and four tythings. Each trust lot was to be used for a civic purpose, such as a school, government building, church, museum, or other public venue, while the tythings were each subdivided into ten lots for residential use. The wards were oriented in a rectlinear grid with north-south and east-west alignment.

The Wormsloe Historic Site, informally known as Wormsloe Plantation, is a state historic site near Savannah, Georgia, in the southeastern United States. The site consists of 822 acres protecting part of what was once the Wormsloe Plantation, a large estate established by one of Georgia’s colonial founders, Noble Jones.

The site includes a picturesque 1.5 miles oak avenue, the ruins of Jones’ fortified house built of tabby, a museum, and a demonstration area interpreting colonial daily life. In 1736, Noble Jones obtained a grant for 500 acres of land on the Isle of Hope that would form the core of Wormsloe.

He constructed a fortified house on the southeastern tip of the island overlooking the Skidaway Narrows, a strategic section of the Skidaway River located along the Intracoastal Waterway roughly halfway between downtown Savannah and the Atlantic Ocean.

The fortified house was part of a network of defensive structures established by James Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia, and early Georgia colonists to protect Savannah from a potential Spanish invasion.

Telfair Museums, in the historic district of Savannah, Georgia, was the first public art museum in the Southern United States. Founded through the bequest of Mary Telfair, a prominent local citizen, and operated by the Georgia Historical Society until 1920, the museum opened in 1886 in the Telfair family’s renovated Regency style mansion, known as the Telfair Academy.

The museum currently contains a collection of over 4,500 American and European paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, housed in three buildings: the 1818 Telfair Academy; the 1816 Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters, which are both National Historic Landmarks designed by British architect William Jay in the early nineteenth century; and the contemporary Jepson Center for the Arts, designed by Moshe Safdie and completed in 2006.