#5: The Pink House
To His Excellency President Lincoln, Washington, D.C.:
I beg to present you as a Christmas-gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.
—W.T. Sherman, Major General
Habersham’s Pink House on Reynolds Square
James Habersham, Jr. was one of the earliest aristocrats of Savannah and the surrounding Low Country.
His father was a successful merchant, a pioneer in opening commercial trade between the cities of Savannah, Georgia, and London, England; his father also became an early statesman to the British North American Colony of Georgia and had earlier joined with the Reverend George Whitefield as a school teacher, helping to educate the orphans at the Bethesda Orphanage that Whitefield founded in 1740 and where the teachers deployed rather harsh disciplinary methods and evangelical indoctrination.
Once James Oglethorpe permanently returned to England, James Habersham, Sr. became an influential advocate promoting the adoption of slavery in the Georgia colony, a practice Oglethorpe and the Trustees long forbid. He also remained a loyalist during the American Revolutionary War, although he died in 1775 just before the Declaration of Independence was adopted. The senior Habersham’s three sons, however, all took up arms against the British or actively joined the American Revolution.
In 1789, the year Savannah originally became an incorporated city, James Habersham, Jr. built his family home on the site of an original land grant from the British Crown. In 1796 and again in 1820, the home survived two of Savannah’s most massive fires, when hundreds of homes were burned to the ground. The Habersham House is now recognized as the oldest 18th Century brick mansion in the State of Georgia. They say the house became known as Habersham’s Pink House when the original red brick bled through overlaid white stucco on the outer walls.
Habersham used the house as one of his residences until his early death in 1802. Soon thereafter, it became a branch of the United States Bank and later the Planters Bank of Georgia, the first bank set up in Georgia. At the bitter end of the American Civil War when General Sherman occupied Savannah, the house served as headquarters to General York, one of his aides. Today, the still-existing cast-iron vaults are used as a wine cellar for one of my favorite restaurants. (At The Pink House, the Duck is to die for!)
‘More than the Mercer House’ is a tagline used in a wonderful book written by Dr. Dorothy Williams Kingery entitled: Savannah’s Jim Williams & His Southern Houses. Kingery is sister to the late Jim Williams. Her book records the many homes saved and restored by her famous brother, Jim Williams, in addition to the Mercer-Williams house that was made legendary by John Berendt’s book and Clint Eastwood’s film: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Jim Williams bought the Pink House in 1968. At the time, the house was used mainly as a tearoom. Soon after its purchase, Williams threatened to put a wrecking ball to the house when the City of Savannah raised its property taxes by 25%. But Williams restored and soon sold the home. And after some controversy involving a liquor license, a Pink House restaurant and tavern has been operating ever since.
Luba’s Pink House painting in progress.
