In 1791 the newly formed municipal government began expanding Savannah’s colonial town plan by adding two new wards—Warren and Washington—to the east of the northernmost row of wards, following the pattern established by Oglethorpe in 1733. A second expansion occurred in 1799, adding Columbia and Greene wards. Constrained by the size of the East Common and the establishment of a one-hundred-foot-wide broad street (c. 1770) at its edge, these four easternmost wards are necessarily narrower in their east-west dimension, with tythings comprising four rather than five lots across and smaller squares, yet all streets maintain the widths of streets in the original town wards. Consequently, these wards and their squares are more intimate in scale than the original six. Because of their more peripheral location and because they escaped the devastating fire of 1796, some of the city’s oldest buildings are found in these wards. They also have a greater percentage of wood-frame structures and are more residential in character than the more central wards. These neighborhoods saw extensive and enthusiastic renovation and preservation efforts in the 1960s, leading to some rather imaginative results and several cases of buildings being moved here from other locations in the historic district.
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