Columbia Ward and the First Expansion of Savannah
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Columbia Ward represents the first push beyond Savannah’s original riverfront. It is the moment, late in the eighteenth century, when the city decided that the four wards Oglethorpe had laid out along the bluff in 1733 were no longer enough.
Each ward is a quadrant: four blocks of ten residential lots arrayed north and south of a central green; four smaller “trust” blocks reserved for civic uses on the east and west sides; the green itself a roughly one-acre square that doubled as a militia muster ground, a fire break, and an open public room. Six wards were sketched out before Oglethorpe returned to England, and the city kept building them, twenty-four in all, eventually.
Columbia was among the wards laid out in 1799, in the same surveying campaign that produced Greene Square to its east and the now-vanished Liberty Square to its west. It was named not for a person but for “Columbia,” the female personification of the United States that was popular in the early Republic, possibly with an additional nod to the new federal capital.
Columbia Square and the Northeast Quarter
Columbia Square sits at the corner of Habersham and East President Streets, in the northeast quadrant of the historic district, and it is one of the city’s quieter squares. The northeast was for much of the nineteenth century the rougher side of Savannah, close to the docks, to the foundries, and to what was then called the Eastern Commons, a heavily Irish neighborhood of taverns, boarding houses, and laborers’ cottages. Foundries, workshops, and modest housing existed alongside more refined residences, creating a layered environment that reflected the working city as much as the planned one.
The square has no formal monument. At its center is a small fountain rendered in cast iron to look like a tree trunk wreathed in vines and ferns. It originally stood on Wormsloe, the colonial-era estate of Noble Jones (a member of Oglethorpe’s first landing party) on the Isle of Hope, and was donated to the square around 1970 by Jones’s descendants in memory of Augusta and Wymberley De Renne. It is sometimes claimed to be the oldest fountain in Savannah; it is certainly one of the most idiosyncratic.
Architecture and Preservation
Columbia Square’s claim on Savannah’s history is greater than its size. On the northwest corner stands the Davenport House, a Federal-style brick mansion built in 1820 by the master builder Isaiah Davenport for his own family. By the early 1950s the house had fallen into decay and was scheduled for demolition. Seven Savannah women, led by Anna C. Hunter, raised $22,500 to buy and save it in 1955, and in doing so founded the Historic Savannah Foundation, the organization that has since been responsible for the rescue of more than 350 buildings across the historic district. The Davenport House was the foundation’s first project, the one that proved the model.
The Abraham Sheftall House at 321 East York Street, on the south side of the square, was built in 1818 (originally on Elbert Square, since lost) and now houses the foundation’s offices. One block west, on Oglethorpe Square, sits the Owens-Thomas House, built between 1816 and 1819 to the design of the young English architect William Jay for the merchant Richard Richardson. It remains one of the finest examples of English Regency architecture in the United States, and the cast-iron side veranda is the balcony from which the Marquis de Lafayette addressed Savannah on his 1825 tour.
The buildings around Columbia Square span more than seventy years: 1818 (Sheftall), 1820 (Davenport), 1819 (the Owens-Thomas House one block over), 1892 (Kehoe). The Oglethorpe pattern is still perfectly visible underneath them: the central green, the four flanking residential blocks, the trust lots on the east and west. The ward is, in that sense, the textbook version of how the city was supposed to work.
Where the Kehoe House Fits
The Kehoe House is the youngest of the major buildings on Columbia Square, and the most exuberant. William Kehoe arrived in Savannah from Wexford, Ireland in 1842, when he was ten, and grew up in the Old Fort District a few blocks east. He apprenticed at a local iron foundry, eventually became its foreman, then bought it. By the late 1860s he had married Anne Flood and set up his own foundry near the riverfront.
By the 1880s he had become one of Savannah’s most successful industrial entrepreneurs, with a wife, ten surviving children, and a piece of land across from his earlier home on Columbia Square. He commissioned the Savannah architect DeWitt Bruyn to design a new family house. Construction ran from the late 1880s through May 1892. The cost was $25,000.
Architectural classifications of the Kehoe House vary across sources. Most call it Queen Anne or Queen Anne Revival, others Renaissance Revival, and a few simply Victorian. The defining feature, however, is the cast iron. The exterior stairways, balustrades, window cornices, fluted columns and capitals, fences, and gates were all manufactured at Kehoe’s own foundry, and the building functions partly as a portfolio piece for what his patternmakers and casters could do.
Four stories of rose-red brick, terracotta detailing, paired chimneys, a corner cupola: this is the architecture of an immigrant who has arrived. What distinguishes it, though, is not only the building itself but its position within the city. The Kehoes lived in the house until 1930, after which it served as a boarding school and then, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, the Goette Funeral Home. From 1980 to 1992 it was owned by the NFL quarterback Joe Namath, who had reportedly considered turning it into a club. Neighborhood opposition redirected the project into a residential restoration, and in the 1990s the building was converted into the inn it is today, with 13 guest rooms.
A More Connected Way to Experience Savannah
Columbia Ward sits between the riverfront and Forsyth Park, between the earliest phase of the city and its later expansion. Movement through the historic district naturally passes through this area, and staying here places you in that flow. Restaurants, shops, and cultural sites are within a short walk in every direction, and the rhythm of the city remains active beyond the quieter pulse of the residential squares to the south.
For a quieter, more residential experience, the Eliza Thompson House on Jones Street, in Pulaski Ward, offers a more inward perspective on Savannah. For a setting defined by larger-scale architecture, The Gastonian next to Forsyth Park in Calhoun Ward, provides a more expansive environment. For those drawn to the riverfront and a livelier edge of the city, East Bay Inn sits closer to Savannah’s working waterfront and its dining scene.
Columbia Ward offers something different. A version of Savannah that is less about stepping away from the city and more about being fully within it.
A Five-Minute Walk from our Front Door
Step out onto Columbia Square. Cross to the Wormsloe Fountain at the center, then continue diagonally to the Davenport House on the northwest corner, the building that started the modern preservation movement in Savannah in 1955.
From the Davenport House, walk one block west on East State Street to Oglethorpe Square and the Owens-Thomas House at 124 Abercorn Street. The cast-iron side veranda is the one Lafayette spoke from in 1825, and the slave quarters at the rear are among the earliest preserved urban examples in the South.
Return east on East York Street. On the south side of Columbia Square, pause at the Abraham Sheftall House (321 East York), built 1818, now the headquarters of the Historic Savannah Foundation.
Continue two blocks east to Greene Square, laid out in the same 1799 campaign as Columbia. It is rarely visited, surrounded by some of the oldest houses in the historic district, and gives a clear sense of the eastern edge of the early city before the Eastern Commons gave way to industry.