Pulaski Ward and the Quiet Logic of Savannah’s West Side

Savannah is often described as a city of squares, but that’s tourist’s shorthand.

The real unit of the city is the ward, a roughly ten-acre cell of streets, lots, and a central green. The pattern was drawn up in 1733 by General James Oglethorpe, the British soldier and parliamentarian who founded the Georgia colony, and was replicated, almost without revision, by successive generations of city councils until the 1850s. 

Each ward holds a square at its heart, two rows of residential “tything” blocks running along its north and south flanks, and four “trust” lots on the east and west sides that were originally meant for civic buildings. Forty house lots, one square, a community in miniature. The system was so adaptable that Savannah simply made more of them as it grew, until twenty-four wards filled the original common.

What Defines Pulaski Ward

Pulaski Ward sits in the fourth row of those wards, on the city’s west side, with Pulaski Square at its center on Barnard Street between Harris and Macon. It was laid out in 1837, relatively late in the original sequence, alongside Madison and Lafayette Squares to its east, and named for Casimir Pulaski, the Polish cavalry officer who came to America at Benjamin Franklin’s urging and was mortally wounded leading a charge during the 1779 Siege of Savannah.

The square is one of the few in the historic district that has no monument at its center. Pulaski’s obelisk stands six blocks east in Monterey Square, where it was erected in 1853. What Pulaski Square has instead is one of the densest concentrations of mature live oaks in the city, and a domestic, residential character that distinguishes it from the more ceremonial squares along Bull Street.

The architecture around Pulaski Ward is plainer-spoken than what you’ll find on the central monument squares. The buildings are mostly brick, Georgia gray, made locally, with a few wood-frame survivors. A high proportion of the houses were built between the late 1830s and the 1850s as rental properties, which is why the streetscape feels uniform rather than show-offy: paired houses, row houses, and “Savannah-style” homes of two to four stories, with stoops, ironwork, and the discipline of repetition.

The two oldest buildings on the square, the Theodosius Bartow House at 126 West Harris and the Bernard Constantine House at 218 West Harris, both date to 1839. The Francis Bartow House, where the first high-ranking Georgian killed in the Civil War once lived, also faces the square. In 1965 the Historic Savannah Foundation made the Pulaski Square / West Jones Street project its first major restoration push, a thirteen-acre rescue effort that helped underwrite Savannah’s National Historic Landmark designation the following year.

Jones Street and the Residential Edge of Savannah

Jones Street Entrance

Jones Street is Pulaski Ward’s southern edge, and it is the part of the ward most travelers know by reputation. It runs almost the entire width of the historic district, brick-paved in stretches and roofed over by live oaks. The blocks west of Bull Street, including the one anchored by the Eliza Thompson House, are commonly cited among the most beautiful residential streets in the country, less because of any single building than because the whole block reads as a continuous nineteenth-century interior wall: brick row houses with raised stoops, slim iron railings, jib windows, side gardens, and rear carriage houses tucked behind. The effect is not architectural spectacle, but consistency. A street that was built to be lived in, and still is.

Where the Eliza Thompson House Fits

The Eliza Thompson House, at 5 West Jones Street, was the first house built on the street. Joseph Thompson, a cotton trader and bank director, completed it in 1847, at the moment Jones Street itself was beginning to take shape. He built it for his wife Elizabeth Margaret Shaffer Thompson and their children. Eliza was widowed by 1855. Against the customs of the time, she managed her late husband’s investments herself until her death in 1875.

The house was extended around 1870, when the original side porch was enclosed, the front door moved, and a smaller front entrance with a stoop and stair built in its current position. The addition gives the building its slightly asymmetrical face today.

It is not the most ornate house on Jones Street; it is one of the most archetypal. A Federal-era plan modified during the antebellum period, with the deep ironwork and brick courtyard typical of the block. Today it operates as a 25-room inn, with the original house and its 1870 extension flanking a brick-paved garden courtyard centered on a fountain by the Savannah sculptor Ivan Bailey.

A Residential Machine, Still Working

What’s worth understanding about Pulaski Ward is that it is the part of Savannah where the Oglethorpe plan most clearly serves its original purpose: as a residential machine.

There are no museums on Pulaski Square. There is no monument. The Jewish Educational Alliance building of 1914, on the square’s east side, is now a residence hall for the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). The ward’s role in the city’s life is to be lived in.

That is the context in which the Eliza Thompson House makes the most sense, not as a destination, but as a piece of the wall. That is precisely what staying here offers: not a vantage point over Savannah, but a place inside it.

For some travelers, that is the point. A quieter, more grounded experience of the city, where the emphasis is on walking, noticing, and returning to the same streets at different times of day.

For those who prefer to be closer to Savannah’s evening rhythm, restaurants, and a more central flow through the historic district, a stay at Kehoe House, in Columbia Ward on the northeast side of the historic district, may be a more natural fit. For others looking for a more expansive, architectural experience with larger rooms and a stronger sense of occasion, The Gastonian sits at the edge of Calhoun Ward, just north of Forsyth Park.

Pulaski Ward, and Jones Street in particular, offers something different: a version of Savannah that reveals itself slowly, and rewards staying still.

Five-Minute Walk from the Front Door

• Step out onto Jones Street and turn west. The block between Bull and Whitaker is the single most photographed stretch of residential Savannah; walk it slowly and notice how few of the doorways match.
  

• At Whitaker, turn right (north). Within two blocks you reach the southwest corner of Pulaski Square. The square is small, oak-shaded, and conspicuously empty at its center, a deliberate absence. The Francis Bartow House faces the square from the east.
  

• Walk west across the square along West Macon Street. Note the Theodosius Bartow House (126 W. Harris) and the Bernard Constantine House (218 W. Harris), the two oldest buildings on the square, both 1839, and the gray brickwork that gives the ward its color.
  

• Return south on Barnard. Just before Jones, glance up at Savannah Coffee Roasters at 215 West Liberty Street (a few blocks north, if you have a few extra minutes), a useful orientation point and one of the few commercial addresses inside the otherwise residential ward.