Greene Square in Savannah 

I came across Greene Square in Savan­nah while wan­der­ing through the town one evening. This square was ded­i­cated in 1799 and named after Major Gen­eral Nathanael Greene. I know, because it says so on the plaque. Greene was a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War hero and an aide to Gen­eral Wash­ing­ton. That res­onates with me for a cou­ple of reasons.

On a basic level, I have an appre­ci­a­tion of his­tory. So did my Aunt Dorothy, who took it upon her­self to trace our fam­ily roots. No rela­tion to Gen­eral Greene, but Dorothy traced part of the fam­ily tree back to 1634. Some years later, one of my ances­tors (Elisha Bas­com) mar­ried the sis­ter of Nathan Hale. his claim to fame was to be caught by the British and uttered “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my coun­try” before they stretched his neck. Ol’ Nathan was dead for three years before the mar­riage, so we don’t really get any Christ­mas cards from that side of the family.

The other part of my fam­ily his­tory that I thought about while vis­it­ing Greene Square in Savan­nah had to do with par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War. Accord­ing to the fam­ily leg­end, one of my ances­tors was an aide to Gen­eral Wash­ing­ton. I don’t mean the kind of aide that had rank like Major Gen­eral Nathanael Greene. I’m think­ing more like a flunky. The prob­lem is that this leg­end doesn’t have much doc­u­men­ta­tion. Oh, there’s off­spring named George Wash­ing­ton Beem, but I wish Dorothy found some key evi­dence about this claimed aid to Gen­eral Wash­ing­ton. It’s not that it would lower my taxes, but it would be an inter­est­ing point of trivia.

It’s not too dif­fi­cult to believe. Many Beem’s have served in wartime and as law enforce­ment offi­cers. Not me. I had a strong aver­sion to injury and death, so I avoided mil­i­tary service.

The thing I liked most about Greene Square in Savan­nah, and all the other squares that I dis­cov­ered, was that they existed as a lit­tle peace­ful oasis in the city. For a cou­ple hun­dred years, it’s been a place where folks can step away from the shops, traf­fic and the bus­tle of soci­ety. You can still see all of those things, hear all of those things — but life in the square is a nice moment of relax­ation. It makes me wish we had more such retreats where I live.