Savannah, GA
Opened 1942 as Chatham Field, a WWII training base. Civilian operations expanded post-war. Gateway to Savannah's cobblestone historic district and Hilton Head Island's resort communities. The "Forrest Gump bench" was filmed in Chippewa Square downtown.
Savannah is where the Eighth Air Force was activated in January 1942 before it shipped to England — and this museum in Pooler, just west of the city, tells the story of the 26,000 Eighth Air Force airmen who died in the bombing campaign over Europe, more dead than the entire U.S. Marine Corps lost in the Pacific. Opened in 1996, its centerpiece is the restoration of the B-17 "City of Savannah." Outside sit a B-47 Stratojet, a MiG-17, and an F-4 Phantom; inside, a recreated bomber mission and the human stories of the young men who flew daylight raids into the most heavily defended airspace in the world.
America's first planned city, laid out in 1733 by James Oglethorpe in 24 squares — public greens surrounded by streets, with house lots radiating off each square. 22 of the original squares survive, shaded by 250-year-old live oaks draped in Spanish moss. The district covers 2.5 square miles, the largest National Historic Landmark in the country. Sherman spared Savannah during his March to the Sea in 1864, presenting it to Lincoln as a Christmas gift, which is why so much antebellum architecture survives. Forsyth Park anchors the southern end with its iconic 1858 white fountain. The Savannah River frontage runs cargo ships past the historic cotton warehouses on River Street.
A 12-mile foot-shaped barrier island at the southern tip of the South Carolina Sea Islands — and a key site in the lesser-known history of African-American self-government during the Civil War. After U.S. Navy ships captured Hilton Head in November 1861 (the largest amphibious assault in U.S. history at that point), thousands of formerly enslaved people from surrounding plantations fled to the Union-occupied island. In 1862, U.S. Brigadier General Ormsby Mitchel laid out Mitchelville on the island's north end — the first self-governed town of formerly enslaved African-Americans in U.S. history, with elected mayor, town council, compulsory school attendance laws (the first in the South), and a population that reached 1,500 by 1865. The Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park preserves the site today. Hilton Head is also the center of Gullah Geechee culture — the creole culture and language descended from West African Mende, Vai, Wolof, and other linguistic groups blended with English, preserved on the isolated Sea Islands from coastal North Carolina to Florida among the descendants of rice-plantation enslaved workers. Congress designated the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor in 2006. Today Hilton Head is also a resort island built around Charles Fraser's 1957 Sea Pines Plantation development — Harbour Town and the iconic 1969 candy-striped Sea Pines Forest Preserve lighthouse.
Founded in 1676 on the Ashley River, Magnolia is the oldest plantation in the South still in the same family, and home to the oldest public gardens in America — opened to visitors in 1870 to save the family from ruin after the Civil War. Unlike the rigid formal gardens of Europe, Magnolia's are romantic and wild: winding paths through ancient live oaks dripping Spanish moss, reflecting ponds, the famous long white bridge, and a riot of azaleas and camellias that peak in spring. The grounds also preserve original cabins of the enslaved people who worked the rice fields, with an honest history program. The old rice impoundments along the Ashley are now a wildlife refuge full of alligators and wading birds.