Bonaventure has always been a place of great beauty, steeped in history.  The cemetery became famous when the haunting Bird Girl statue was placed on the cover of the book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  Of course, the statue is no longer in the cemetery and was moved to the Telfair Museum to protect her!  There are many notable burials, many of which you’ll learn about on your tour.

Located on the scenic bluffs of the Wilmington River, the cemetery is the former site of the Bonaventure Plantation.  It was later sold to become a private cemetery. Eventually the City of Savannah purchased the land and made the cemetery public.

Naturalist John Muir once camped in the cemetery for six days and later wrote, “I gazed awe-stricken as one new-arrived from another world.  Bonaventure is called a graveyard, a town of the dead, but the few graves are powerless in such a depth of life. The rippling of living waters, the song of birds, the joyous confidence of flowers, the calm, undisturbable grandeur of the oaks, mark this place of graves as one of the Lord’s most favored abodes of life and light.”