Bonaventure (see page ii) traces its origins to the colonial era. British colonel John Mulryne, who owned more than nine thousand acres of land in Georgia including productive sawmills, settled his family in 1765 on a large six-hundred-acre plantation along the Wilmington River, naming it Bonaventure, from the French for “good fortune.” In 1779 Mulryne’s plantation was seized by French naval commander Charles D’Estaing, who arrived to drive the British out of Savannah. The Bonaventure plantation house was turned into a military hospital and Thunderbolt village became the locus of communication between the American land forces and the French fleet during the Siege of Savannah. Ownership of the plantation passed through several prominent Savannahians—John Habersham, Josiah Tattnall Jr., Commodore Josiah Tattnall III, and finally Peter Wiltberger in 1846, who set aside seventy acres for a public cemetery, but died soon after his purchase. His son William fulfilled his father’s dream, forming the Evergreen Cemetery Company of Bonaventure in 1868 to sell and manage family plots in perpetuity.
Bonaventure typifies how Victorian-era cemeteries served as places to mourn while they emphasized the romanticism and ritual of death and provided space to escape the city for leisurely walks and picnics. In October 1867, naturalist John Muir stayed overnight for five days in Bonaventure and concluded, in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (posthumously published in 1916), “If that burying-ground across the Sea of Galilee, mentioned in Scripture, was half as beautiful as Bonaventure, I do not wonder that a man should dwell among the tombs.”
The City of Savannah purchased the cemetery for $30,000 in 1907 as a public burial ground, and acquired the adjacent Greenwich Plantation in 1937. Significant gravesites in Bonaventure include those of local songwriter Johnny Mercer, poet Conrad Aiken, and Georgia’s first governor, Edward Telfair. Yet the cemetery also reveals a broad and diverse history of the area, ranging from the small, often poignant graves that recall the staggering rates of child mortality in the nineteenth century to the large burial plot dedicated to the Brotherhood of Railroad Conductors, men who worked their entire lives for the Central of Georgia Railroad and retired to Savannah (see 15.3).