Johnson Square: The Birthplace of Georgia

Why is it significant?

Stand in the shade of the live oak trees in Johnson Square and listen to the splash of the twin stone fountains.

Key Facts

Listen · 1:13

Stand in the shade of the live oak trees in Johnson Square and listen to the splash of the twin stone fountains. Laid out in seventeen thirty-three, this was the very first of General James Oglethorpe's twenty-four planned communal squares, designed to serve as defensive assembly points and social commons for the new colony of Georgia. Look at the soaring white obelisk in the center of the square: it marks the grave of Major General Nathanael Greene, George Washington's brilliant second-in-command during the Revolutionary War, whose tactical genius liberated the Carolinas and Georgia from British forces. Facing the square is Christ Church, the mother church of Georgia, where John Wesley served as minister in seventeen thirty-six and founded America's first Sunday school before returning to England to establish Methodism. Beneath the square's soil lie early colonial graves from epidemics of yellow fever. Walk south along Bull Street beneath hanging tendrils of Spanish moss toward Wright Square.