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American towns don't come much nicer than SAVANNAH , seventeen miles up the Savannah River from the ocean, on the border with South Carolina. The appealing Historic District , ranged around Spanish-moss-swathed squares, formed the core of the original city, and today boasts examples of just about every architectural style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the atmospheric cobbled waterfront on the Savannah River , key to the postwar economy, is edged by towering old cotton warehouses.

Savannah was founded in 1733 by James Oglethorpe as the first settlement of the new British colony of Georgia. His intention was to establish a haven for debtors, with no Catholics, lawyers or hard liquor, and above all, no slaves. However, with the arrival of North Carolinan settlers in the 1750s, the town became a major export center, at the end of important railroad lines by which cotton was funneled from far away in the South. Sherman arrived here in December 1864 at the end of his March to the Sea; he offered the town to Abraham Lincoln as a Christmas gift, but at Lincoln's urging left it intact and set to work apportioning land to freed slaves. This was the first recognition of the need for ''reconstruction,'' though such concrete economic provision was rarely to occur again.

The plantations floundered after the Civil War; cotton prices slumped, and Savannah went into decline. There was little industry beyond the port, and as that fell into disuse and decay, so too did Savannah's graceful townhouses and tree-lined boulevards. Not until the 1960s did local citizens start to organize what has been, on the whole, the successful restoration of their town recently, and tentatively, extended to the predominantly Victorian District .

Savannah has acquired a new notoriety of late thanks to its starring role in John Berendt's best-selling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil ; For a sense of what goes on behind closed doors in the city, it's an unbeatable read, and locals delight in making dark hints as to how much they knew, or even did, themselves. If you want to look behind the closed doors for yourself.