.jpg/1920px-Mercer_House%2C_Savannah%2C_GA%2C_US_(02).jpg)
Read aloud by your device's voice. It sounds different on each device.
The square
Monterey Square was laid out in 1847 to mark a battle of 1846
Monterey Square is one of the 22 squares of Savannah and was laid out in 1847. It commemorates the Battle of Monterrey in 1846, when American forces under General Zachary Taylor captured the city of Monterrey. A monument to General Casimir Pulaski stands at its center, erected in 1853. The square is home to Congregation Mickve Israel, one of the few Gothic-style synagogues in America, dating from 1878.
The house
Mercer House was designed for a Mercer, but none ever lived there
Mercer House was designed in the Italianate style by John S. Norris for General Hugh Mercer, great-grandfather of the songwriter Johnny Mercer. Construction began in 1860. The Civil War interrupted the work, and the house was finished around 1868 by a new owner, the cotton merchant John Randolph Wilder. Nobody of the Mercer name ever lived in it.
1969
Jim Williams bought the empty house in 1969 and restored it
For a period in the twentieth century the building was the Savannah Shriners Alee Temple. It then lay vacant for a decade, until 1969, when Jim Williams, one of Savannah's earliest and most dedicated private restorationists, bought it and fully restored it over two years. His restoration workshop was in the basement, where he and three employees repaired antiques.
“If Mercer House was not quite the biggest private house in Savannah, it was certainly the most grandly furnished.”
John Berendt, in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
The book
A 1994 book and a 1997 film were set in the house and on the square
The house and the square feature in John Berendt's 1994 book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and in the 1997 film made from it. Clint Eastwood convinced Dorothy Kingery, Jim Williams's sister, to allow filming inside the house. Her one condition was that none of the unpleasantness be filmed there, so that was done at Warner Bros. The wall around the courtyard was raised after the book appeared.
1981
The house was the scene of the 1981 killing of Danny Hansford
The house was the scene of the 1981 killing of Danny Hansford by the home's owner, Jim Williams. The shooting took place in the study, at the front left of the house. Williams died in 1990. His sister, Dorothy Kingery, then owned the house until she died in 2023.
Day 1, midday
It comes after Forsyth Park. Then Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist.
More stories from this trip idea
The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Mercer House (Savannah, Georgia) and the Wikipedia article Monterey Square (Savannah, Georgia), and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.