“If that burying-ground across the Sea of Galilee, mentioned in Scripture, was half as beautiful  

as Bonaventure, I do not wonder that a man should dwell among the tombs.” 

 —John Muir (A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, 1916) 

Bonaventure Cemetery: The Corinne Elliot Lawton Monument 

John Muir, patron saint of the American environmental movement, marveled upon seeing the Bonaventure Cemetery landscape, located just a couple miles outside of Savannah. 

He wrote in a manuscript published post humorously: “[N]ever since I was allowed to walk the woods have I found so impressive a company of trees as the tillandsia-draped oaks of Bonaventure. The rippling of living waters, the song of birds, the joyous confidence of flowers, the calm, undisturbable grandeur of the oaks, marks this place of graves as one of the Lord’s most favored abodes of life and light.” 

In 1869, the twenty-nine-year-old Muir left his Indianapolis home to walk south to Florida. At the moment he reached Savannah, he had run out of money. As a result, he spent a week camping among the tombs in Bonaventure Cemetery while awaiting funds to continue his adventure. 

Muir would significantly co-found the Sierra Club in 1892 and helped advance the preservation and conservation of so much unspoiled natural American wilderness and landscape. 

Interestingly, visiting Bonaventure Cemetery was one of the most popular tourist attractions among American travelers. In addition to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, author Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote three travel memoirs. Writing in Palmetto Leaves in 1869, she suggested: “…the thing that every stranger in Savannah goes to see, as a matter of course, is Bonaventure.” And it remains true to this day. 

This en Plein air painting is of the Corrine Elliot Lawton sculpture, part of the large Alexander Robert Lawton Family Monument. Alexander Lawton (1818-1896) was a West Point cadet, then graduated from Harvard with a law degree in 1842. He practiced law in Savannah, served in the Georgia legislature, managed essential businesses, and was the American Bar Association president in 1882.  During the Civil War, he made a brigadier general and was later quarter-master general of the Confederate Army. 

When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union the following month. Preparations for Civil War were quickly underway in Georgia. Lawton was in command of the 1st Volunteer Regiment of Georgia. By January 1861, he led the successful capture of Fort Pulaski, a federal fort located just down the Savannah River, long vital to the naval defense of Savannah.  

The Fort was held under Georgian and Confederate control for about a year before Union forces re-captured Pulaski and were in control of the movement of ships through the Savannah port. 

There is a fun (but false) popular legend that Alexander Lawton’s lovesick daughter, Corrine Elliot Lawton, drowned herself in the nearby Wilmington River on the eve of her wedding day because she was not allowed to marry the man of her dreams.  

More likely, Corrine died at age-31 from Yellow Fever. Being a port city visited by many overseas-based ships and surrounded by mosquito-filled swampland, Savannah experienced many severe epidemic outbreaks causing tens-of-thousands of local deaths from Yellow Fever throughout the 1800s.  

Corrine Lawton’s epitaph poetically reads: “Allured to brighter worlds and led the way.” Italian artist Benedetto Civiletti created this gorgeous sculpture for the Lawton family in his studio in Palermo.