Calhoun Ward and Savannah’s Expansion Around Forsyth Park

By the late 1860s, Savannah had reached the southern edge of Oglethorpe’s original common. The grid of wards, each one a square ringed by tything blocks and trust lots, drawn out at roughly 600-foot intervals since 1733, had been replicated south almost as far as it could go.

The last of the Oglethorpe-style wards laid out in the original common were filled in by 1851, the year the city formally designated Forsyth Park. After that, the ward system softened. Streets continued, but the rhythm of the central square began to give way. The area immediately around the park developed as a more conventional residential district, with the park itself functioning as the social commons.

Calhoun Ward sits along this transition, just north of Forsyth Park, on the east side of Bull Street. It was laid out in 1851 as one of the last wards of the original plan and named for John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina senator and former U.S. vice president.

The square at its center was renamed in 2024 to Taylor Square, in honor of Susie King Taylor. The ward itself, however, retains its historic name.

Architecture Around Forsyth Park

Forsyth Park | Photo Credit: Visit Savannah

The architecture in this part of the city is louder than what you find further north. Where Pulaski Ward’s residential row houses, built largely in the late 1830s and 1840s, use a vocabulary of restrained Federal and Greek Revival, the houses fronting Gaston Street and the blocks bracketing Forsyth Park were built in the boom years just before, during, and especially after the Civil War. Italianate, Second Empire, Renaissance Revival, and the so-called Regency-Italianate hybrid. Wider entrance halls. Bracketed cornices. Stuccoed brick painted white or a warm ochre. Cast-iron balconies, often supplied by local foundries.

The shift in style is, in part, a confidence shift. Savannah was less a frontier port now and more a Cotton Exchange city, and its merchants, its wholesale grocers, insurance brokers, and factors, were building accordingly. Where the earlier wards read as measured and repetitive, this part of the city is more composed and more deliberate. The houses are larger. The spacing between them is more generous. This is the part of Savannah where houses stop feeling like units in a system and begin to read as statements.

Forsyth Park as the City’s Center of Gravity

Forsyth Park anchors this shift. The first ten acres were set aside in the early 1840s by the diplomat William Brown Hodgson. In 1851 the city formally laid out the park and named it for John Forsyth, the former governor of Georgia and U.S. Secretary of State.

The cast-iron fountain was ordered from the New York foundry of Janes, Beebe & Company in 1858. It was Model No. 5 in their catalog, a design ultimately derived from a French foundry’s exhibition piece at London’s 1851 Great Exhibition, often (and not entirely accurately) likened to the Fontaines de la Concorde in Paris. The fountain was installed in July 1858 and switched on the following month, immediately drenching the dignitaries in the front row because the new municipal waterworks ran at a far higher pressure than the foundry had assumed.

The park was extended south in 1867 onto a former military parade ground, and over the next several decades the streets around it filled in. Gaston Street forms the elegant northern edge, Whitaker and Drayton flanking it, Park Avenue closing the south. The result is a different kind of Savannah. Less grid, more frontage. Less repetition, more composition.

Where the Gastonian Fits

The Gastonian at 220 East Gaston Street

Two of those Gaston Street houses are the Gastonian. The pair of mansions at 218 and 220 East Gaston Street, on the corner of Lincoln, were both built in 1868. The freestanding house at 220 East Gaston was built for the Savannah insurance broker R. H. Footman; the adjoining house at 218 was built for the wholesale grocer Aaron Champion.

Both are constructed of locally made brick covered in white stucco, in the clean-lined Regency-Italianate style. Tall, balanced, proportioned, with deep window cornices and the quiet authority of the post-war merchant class. The buildings still bear small cracks on the façade and inside the original kitchen fireplace from a late-nineteenth-century earthquake along the coast.

Today they are joined by a wooden walkway over a formal garden and operate together as a 17-room inn, with the address officially recorded as 220 East Gaston. In this part of Savannah, scale is the point, and the Gastonian reflects that shift more clearly than most.

A Different Way to Experience Savannah

For travelers, this part of the city offers a distinct experience. The proximity to Forsyth Park creates a sense of openness that does not exist further north. Streets feel wider. Buildings stand apart rather than forming continuous walls. The rhythm of the city slows slightly. Staying here places you within Savannah’s more expansive, architectural layer. It suits those who value space, proportion, and a quieter form of grandeur.

For a more intimate, residential experience within the tighter historic grid, the Eliza Thompson House on Jones Street, in Pulaski Ward, offers a different perspective. For guests who prefer to be closer to restaurants, shops, and the central flow of the historic district, Kehoe House, in Columbia Ward on the east side, provides a more connected base. 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 restaurants and bars.

Calhoun Ward, and the stretch of Gaston Street that defines it, offers something more composed. A version of Savannah where the city opens outward, and where the architecture begins to carry more of the experience.

Five-Minute Walk from the Gastonian Front Door

• Cross Gaston Street and walk into Forsyth Park. The fountain is a four-minute stroll south down the central path.
  

• Walk west along Gaston Street toward Bull. The block holds some of Savannah’s strongest late-nineteenth-century residential architecture, fronting the park.
  

• At Bull Street, turn north for one block to Monterey Square, the square Pulaski’s monument actually occupies, raised in 1853, and the site of the Mercer-Williams House on its west side.
  

• Return east along Taylor or Charlton Street to circle back to the Gastonian. If you have a few extra minutes, walk five minutes north on Lincoln Street to Colonial Park Cemetery (the city’s primary burial ground from 1750 to 1853) and, beyond it, the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace on Oglethorpe Avenue.