Bonaventure Cemetery

Story

Bonaventure's fame arrived in a single image: Jack Leigh's cover photograph for John Berendt's 1994 book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a small bronze figure of a girl holding two shallow bowls, Spanish moss bleeding into the sky above her. That sculpture, known as the Bird Girl, stood in Bonaventure for decades before anyone paid it much attention. The book made her iconic overnight. By 1997, the original had to be removed — too many hands, too many flashbulbs — and she now lives at the Jepson Center for the Arts on West York Street.

What Bonaventure gives you instead is something harder to frame but more durable. The cemetery sits on a bluff above the Wilmington River, 160 acres of live oaks draped in Spanish moss so dense that the light arrives filtered, green, and slow. It began as the private burial ground of Bonaventure Plantation, owned originally by Colonel John Mullryne. Commodore Josiah Tattnall III sold the plantation and its cemetery to merchant Peter Wiltberger on March 10, 1846. Wiltberger's son formed the Evergreen Cemetery Company on June 12, 1868; the City of Savannah bought it on July 7, 1907 and renamed it Bonaventure.

In October 1867, before any of that civic history settled in, John Muir spent six days and nights sleeping on the graves here. He was walking to Florida, broke, waiting for money to arrive from home, and he found the place breathtakingly beautiful — writing about it later in a chapter he called "Camping in the Tombs." That a man who would go on to found the American conservation movement lay here among the graves, stunned by moss and oak and river light, feels like the cemetery's real origin story. The famous photograph came much later.