The ten-acre garden created by the Georgia Trustees for “Incouraging and Improving Botany and Agriculture” was described by Francis Moore in 1735 as “cleared and brought into such Order that there is already a fine Nursery of Oranges, Olives, white Mulberries, Figs, Peaches and many curious Herbs. Within the Garden there is an artificial Hill, said by the Indians to be raised over the Body of one of their ancient Emperors.” Marvelous and promising from its inception, the Trustees’ Garden was, nevertheless, a failed experiment, the victim of unanticipated temperature fluctuations, poor soil, mismanagement, and a change in priorities. Governor John Reynolds acquired the property for his own use in 1755. A fort was constructed at the edge of the bluff by the British during the Revolutionary War, and was rebuilt by American forces in 1812–1814. A residential neighborhood eventually developed here, off the grid of the ward plan, nostalgically called the “Old Fort” area.
In 1852 the Savannah Gas Light Company purchased the fort, building a variety of structures for coal-gas generation and storage on it over the course of many years, including furnaces, coal sheds, gasometers, offices, and shops. By the 1940s there were six large gas storage vats and the neighborhood around it was described by newspaper journalist John Chamberlain in 1964 as “some of the worst slums on the Eastern seaboard.” With the decommissioning of the gas tanks in 1953, Mary Hillyer, wife of the gas company president Hansell Hillyer, led a campaign to preserve and revitalize the dilapidated structures of this neighborhood, adding lacy ironwork porches to several buildings in an attempt to recall the early history of the site and the utopian origins of the garden. Several nineteenth-century brick structures remain as the complex is being developed by Charles H. Morris as an arts center. The renovated, one-story brick building at 12 Hillyer Place (1881, William Farmer), now called Charles H. Morris Center at Trustees’ Garden (2011 renovation, Dawson Architects), is restrained but inventive in its employment of corbeled cornice details and a pilastered facade framing segmental-arched hoods over casement windows with fanlights (now replaced). The original iron rod Pratt trusses remain exposed inside, and its gutted interior now serves as a multipurpose event space.
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