The Central Railroad and Banking Company of Georgia commissioned Boston architects Van Brunt and Howe to design this imposing monument to honor their founder and first president, William Washington Gordon. In 1739 Oglethorpe erected an earlier stone monument on this site (possibly the first public monument in America) over the tomb of Tomochichi, but it had disappeared by the late eighteenth century. Photos of a decorative earthen mound installed here by the City in 1872 (one of at least four placed in Savannah squares) and removed for the 1882 tribute gave rise to the local myth that the Gordon Monument “desecrated” the chief’s tomb. Van Brunt and Howe’s design incorporates a limestone base with relief panels supporting four polished red granite columns and crowned by four angelic cherubs supporting a globe. The nearby Tomochichi Monument (1899) resulted from rekindled interest in the local Indian chief, or Mico, in the late nineteenth century, paralleling improved attitudes towards Native Americans nationally. The Society of the Colonial Dames of America in Georgia (led by their first president, Gordon’s daughter-in-law, Eleanor Kinzie Gordon), who secured the large granite boulder from the Stone Mountain Company in Atlanta for one dollar, commissioned this monument.