The square commemorates President James Madison, who died in 1836. To the south of the Jasper Monument (8.8), an 1848 city cistern cover (the oldest example in Savannah), emblazoned with an American eagle, marks the location of one of the brick cisterns installed in the city’s squares between 1833 and 1850, this one constructed by local contractor and mason Adam Short. A pair of bronze 1860s field cannon (Model 1857, 12-Pounder Napoleon) stands at the square’s southern edge; these were donated in 1920 by the Savannah Volunteer Guards to commemorate the starting points of Georgia’s first two highways, Augusta Road leading to Augusta and Ogeechee Road leading to Darien. From 1872 to 1879, a decorative earthen mound crowned by a Warwick Vase (modeled after the famous Warwick Vase discovered in 1771 at Hadrian’s Villa and eventually owned by George Grenville, the 2nd Earl of Warwick)—now in the garden of the adjacent Green-Meldrim House (8.5)—occupied the center of the square.

