The Pirates' House

The story

In 1734, General James Oglethorpe laid out an experimental ten-acre botanical plot modeled after London's Chelsea Physic Garden, intending to cultivate mulberry trees, indigo, and cotton for the British Empire. The plot's gardener lived in a modest timber cottage known as the Herb House. When the agricultural experiment collapsed twenty years later, the site was converted into an inn by roughly 1753, catering to privateers, merchant seamen, and rogue sailors coming off the Savannah River docks. The original Herb House was incorporated directly into the expanding tavern structure, giving it a solid claim as Georgia's oldest standing building.

The property's reputation grows stranger where real maritime crime overlaps with literary fiction. Robert Louis Stevenson explicitly wrote in *Treasure Island* that the ruthless pirate Captain Flint died in Savannah, groaning for rum and calling out to his mate Darby M'Graw. Local tradition pegged this exact tavern as Flint's deathbed, and framed pages from rare early printings of the novel still line the walls of the restaurant's Treasure Room. Below the floorboards, press gangs allegedly operated out of a cellar trapdoor, knocking unsuspecting sailors unconscious and dragging them through a brick tunnel straight to the wharf to be shanghaied.