Savannah is a city built on a plan, and students can still walk it square by shaded square. At the Massie Heritage Center, maps and models show how the famous ward-and-square design works; outside the door, the squares themselves prove it. A reserved visit to the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters examines the unequal lives of the free and enslaved people who shared one urban household. At Fort Pulaski, students stand where rifled cannon fire changed military history and where freedom seekers found a path out of slavery. A hands-on Tybee Island ecology program closes the tour with tides, dunes, and living coastal species as field evidence.
At Massie Heritage Center and in Savannah’s squares, students use maps, models, streets, and monuments to understand how a planned city organizes movement, community life, and public memory.
Explore this objective
Massie has interpreted city planning both inside the center and on Savannah’s streets and squares for nearly four decades. After using the exhibits, students can test the plan on foot: does the repeated arrangement of streets and squares shape how people move through the city, and what does monument placement show about who a public space asks us to remember?
Close objective
At the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters, students compare architecture, objects, and surviving spaces to examine the unequal lives of free and enslaved residents in urban Savannah.
Explore this objective
The original slave quarters housed roughly five to fourteen people, most of them women, children, or teenagers, while the space now presented as a formal garden originally functioned as a work yard. Comparing these areas with the mansion’s public rooms shows how elegant display depended on domestic labor and how later landscape changes can hide a site’s working history.
Close objective
At Fort Pulaski, students investigate fort design, rifled artillery, and wartime change while tracing how the site became a destination for freedom seekers during the Civil War.
Explore this objective
Rifled cannon breached Fort Pulaski’s masonry walls in about thirty hours, helping make a once-formidable class of fort obsolete. After Union occupation, the same fort became a destination for freedom seekers, allowing students to trace how one technological change altered military strategy and how control of a place could change its meaning.
Close objective
On Tybee Island, students observe tides, dunes, marshes, shells, and coastal creatures up close, then use hands-on field methods to see how life adapts to a shifting barrier island.
Explore this objective
Beach and marsh programs ask students to collect and compare evidence in two neighboring environments. Differences in tide exposure, sediment, and living things help them explain why a barrier island contains several connected habitats and how field observations inform coastal stewardship.
Close objective
We design each tour with a scaffolded thematic progression wherever the destination and itinerary allow: each day establishes context, gives students evidence to work with, and prepares them for the next idea.
Theme the day. Encounter the evidence. Reflect and connect.
Each day begins with a clear theme and the context students need. At each site, our Storyteller Guides direct attention to the objects, documents, spaces, and stories that make the theme concrete. Short discussions and reflection prompts help students connect the experience to prior learning and carry an idea forward to the next day.
Learning theme/Orientation, Trade & Public Memory
Arrive in Savannah and begin at Johnson Square, the first of the city’s original squares. Follow the street grid toward River Street, where former cotton warehouses, river traffic, and the African-American Monument introduce the route’s central questions about design, commerce, labor, and commemoration.
Learning theme/Urban Planning, Architecture & Lived Experience
Start at the Massie Heritage Center to study Savannah’s famous city plan, then test that plan on foot through Taylor Square, Lafayette Square, and Forsyth Park. At the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters, compare the home’s architecture with evidence of the free and enslaved people who occupied it.
Learning theme/Engineering, Freedom & Coastal Systems
Travel east to Fort Pulaski National Monument for a ranger-led or structured self-guided experience focused on military engineering, rifled artillery, and freedom-seeker history. Continue along the same coastal corridor to the Tybee Island Marine Science Center, where students join a hands-on beach or marsh ecology program beside the Atlantic.
Learning theme/Colonial Georgia, Archaeology & Landscape Memory
At Wormsloe State Historic Site, follow the Interpretive Trail to the ruins of Noble Jones’s fortified home, the family burial site, and an Indigenous shell midden. Museum artifacts and the coastal setting help students compare the city, fort, island, and colonial estate before beginning the return journey.
Forsyth Park Fountain: Bubba73 (Jud McCranie) (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wormsloe Historic Site: Jami430 (CC BY-SA 4.0); Tybee Island Lighthouse: Winkelvi (CC BY 4.0); Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist: PalauanReich (CC BY-SA 4.0); Bonaventure Cemetery: Bubba73 (CC BY-SA 3.0); Fort Pulaski: Jud McCranie (CC BY 3.0)
Who's traveling, when, and where you're coming from. That's all we need to start.
Itinerary, hotels, and motorcoach, priced for your group size and your dates.
Adjust the days, the stops, and the pace until it fits. We handle the rest.
Tell us your group and your dates. We’ll take it from there.
Request a Quote
