Wright Square

Laid out in 1733 as one of Savannah's original four squares, Wright Square carries two men in permanent tension. At its center stands a granite obelisk honoring William Washington Gordon, builder of Georgia's first railroad. But the square's longer story belongs to Tomochichi, the Yamacraw chief whose friendship with Oglethorpe made Savannah's founding possible without the warfare that marked so many early American settlements. When Gordon's monument replaced Tomochichi's original grave marker in 1883, his daughter-in-law fought to restore it — and a new granite boulder from Stone Mountain was erected in 1899, in the square's southeast corner.