What makes Bonaventure Cemetery historically important?
Bonaventure Cemetery occupies a 100-acre bluff overlooking the Wilmington River about three miles east of Savannah's Historic District. The site began as a plantation in 1762, became a private cemetery in 1846, and was purchased by the city in 1907. Its fame exploded in 1994 when John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil used a photograph of the Bird Girl sculpture (originally in Bonaventure, now in the Telfair Academy downtown) on its cover, transforming the cemetery into a literary pilgrimage site. But Bonaventure was extraordinary long before the book. Its avenues of ancient live oaks — some over 250 years old — create natural cathedral naves of moss-draped branches, and the Victorian funerary art scattered among them ranges from weeping angels to elaborate family monuments that rival anything in the great European cemeteries. Bonaventure is both a working cemetery and a de facto sculpture garden. Many of Savannah's most prominent historical figures are buried here: songwriter Johnny Mercer, whose lyrics for "Moon River" were inspired by the marshes visible from this bluff; poet Conrad Aiken, whose parents' murder-suicide in a house on Oglethorpe Square haunted his writing; and generations of the Lowcountry families who shaped Georgia history. The cemetery's location — on a bluff where the tidal marshes extend to the horizon and the river curves out of sight — gives it an atmosphere that is simultaneously melancholy and serene. Bird calls, river breezes, and the occasional splash of a jumping mullet provide the only soundtrack. Visitors who come expecting a macabre experience often find instead a place of profound beauty and peace.