In the same neighborhood, just without the town, lies the public cemetery
surrounded by an ancient wall, built before the revolution, which in some
places shows the marks of shot fired against it in the skirmishes of that
period. I entered it, hoping to find some monuments of those who founded
the city a hundred and ten years ago, but the inscriptions are of
comparatively recent date. Most of them commemorate the death of persons
born in Europe, or the northern states. I was told that the remains of the
early inhabitants lie in the brick tombs, of which there are many without
any inscription whatever.
At a little distance, near a forest, lies the burial-place of the black
population. A few trees, trailing with long moss, rise above hundreds of
nameless graves, overgrown with weeds; but here and there are scattered
memorials of the dead, some of a very humble kind, with a few of marble,
and half a dozen spacious brick tombs like those in the cemetery of the
whites. Some of them are erected by masters and mistresses to the memory
of favorite slaves. One of them commemorates the death of a young woman
who perished in the catastrophe of the steamer Pulaski, of whom it is
recorded, that during the whole time that she was in the service of her
mistress, which was many years, she never committed a theft, nor uttered a
falsehood. A brick monument, in the shape of a little tomb, with a marble
slab inserted in front, has this inscription:
"In memory of Henrietta Gatlin, the infant stranger, born in East
Florida, aged 1 year 3 months."
A graveyard is hardly the place to be merry in, but I could not help
smiling at some of the inscriptions. A fair upright marble slab
commemorates the death of York Fleming, a cooper, who was killed by the
explosion of a powder-magazine, while tightening the hoops of a keg of
powder. It closes with this curious sentence:
"This stone was erected by the members of the Axe Company, Coopers and
Committee of the 2nd African Church of Savannah for the purpose of
having a Herse for benevolent purposes, of which he was the first
sexton."
A poor fellow, who went to the other world by water, has a wooden slab to
mark his grave, inscribed with these words:
"Sacred to the memory of Robert Spencer who came to his Death by A Boat,
July 9th, 1840, aged 21 years.
Reader as you am now so once I
And as I am now so Mus you be Shortly.
Amen."
Another monument, after giving the name of the dead, has this sentence:
