“The wealthier classes, however, have houses of the New York Fifth Avenue character: one  of the best of these, a handsome mansion of rich red sandstone belonged to my host, who coming out from England many years ago, raised himself by industry and intelligence to the position of one of the first merchants in Savannah.” 

 —William H. Russell (diary entry, 1861) 

The Green-Meldrim Mansion 

As you can see, I found myself painting another fabulous mansion designed by New York architect John Norris; this one located near St. John’s Church in Madison Square and originally built for Charles Green, a successful cotton merchant who immigrated from England in 1833. 

The home was sold to Judge Peter Meldrim in 1892, a distinguished Savannah jurist and politician who went on to serve as President of the American Bar Association in 1912-1913. 

The Green-Meldrim Mansion was designed and built between 1853 and 1861 at the reported cost of $93,000 — an incredible price tag in its day, perhaps a little over $2 million today. The home is est known for becoming the headquarters for William Tecumseh Sherman in December 1864, just after he ended his infamous ‘march to the sea’ at the gates of Savannah, where its mayor met the Union Army and surrendered the city. Charles Green personally offered Sherman his home. 

It was in this house that General Sherman dictated his famous telegram in which he presented Savannah as a Christmas gift to President Lincoln, along with ‘about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.’ Some of that booty, we can presume, was confiscated from his host. 

Sherman’s forces occupied the mansion until the war officially ended less than four months later, on April 9, 1865, when General Robert E. Lee, who ‘would rather die a thousand deaths,’ surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at the Appomattox Courthouse to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. 

The two Generals, who both had fought in the Mexican-American War, signed a surrender agreement of less than 200 words, while Grant provided rations for Lee’s hungry soldiers and allowed each to retain a horse to take with them on their way home. 

In 1943, heirs of the Meldrim family sold the house to the St. John’s Episcopal Church, which is located next door, for use as a parish house. Unlike so many of the other Savannah mansions I have painted, this one resided in the hands of only two families before its current owner.  

Later in the 1940s, the garden around the Green-Meldrim Mansion was cleared. The outlines of the original flower beds were excavated and restored. In the 1950s, the St. John’s Episcopal Church brought in pioneering Savannah landscape architect Clermont Lee to re-design its gardens. 

The mansion was entirely renovated by St. John’s Church in 1968 and was designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of Interior in 1976. 

Noteworthy: Julian Hartridge Green, a grandson to both Charles Green and Savannah-born U.S. Congressional Representative Julian Hartridge, was a Paris-based writer and the first American elected to the Académie Françoise. Many of his writings identified with the Confederacy's fate and confronted faith, religion, hypocrisy, and the aristocratic world of lost hope and unrealistic dreams. 
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