Travel Features

Revered Revolutionary War officer and long-ago Georgia governor James Jackson would be so pleased.

Day-to-day life at Old Fort Jackson in Savannah, Georgia goes on just as if Jackson were still, brooding over his meticulous maps and wax-sealed letters.

There’s an endearing genuine eagerness that comes from the scores of young volunteers, dressed in the garb of Johnny-Reb soldiers, wandering around the historic fort. Some carry replica tin cups from a century and a half ago for tea made from water poured from the canteens of the same era. Some strike wooden matches from the soles of their boots to light cigars for off-duty officers relaxing after shift.

Mustachioed soldiers momentarily stare off into space with haunted eyes after reading letters from sweethearts and wives by the firelight of burning wall torches. On long, sultry, summer nights, ever-present chirping crickets take over for music when someone, who was softly strumming the strings of a banjo, lays his instrument aside.

Savannah’s Old Fort Jackson isn’t just a throwback to yesteryear; it is yesteryear in the living!

Edward Teach was wilier than most. As Blackbeard, the pirate, he and his mateys plundered the shipping lanes off North America and the Caribbean in the early 18^th century.

The ship on which the marauding Blackbeard plied the seas was called intriguingly enough, the Queen Anne's Revenge. Historians believe the Queen Anne's Revenge was the French slave ship. La Concorde that was seized by Blackbeard and his roving rogues' gallery near the island of Martinique in 1717,

"…Don't let your little dog get too close to the edge of the pond," a friendly employee at the Brunswick Town-Fort Anderson State historic site told us as we were heading off to check out nearby Orton Gardens.

We had asked about alligators, as we hadn't spotted a single one on our drive along country roads leading to the fort. Orton Gardens is home to the ruins of St. Philip's Anglican, North Carolina's oldest church.

There's something about Wilmington, North Carolina that brings out nostalgia and puts you in the most reflective of moods. It's not the Spanish moss hanging off the trees, the heady aroma of the magnolias, or even the sound of the waves pounding the shore along the Carolina coast. When you're sauntering along cobbled streets in the downtown core, you can almost convince yourself that you'll be running into some long ago Civil War soldiers just as soon as you turn the next corner.