Troup Square

About This Square

Created in 1851 – one of the last squares established in Savannah – the square was named after George McIntosh Troup, a US Senator and Governor for Georgia.

On the NW corner of the square is the Unitarian Universalist Church, which was built in 1850 but not here… it was originally located on Oglethorpe Square. The Unitarian congregation didn’t last and the building was sold in 1860 to a predominantly African-American Episcopalian diocese and that was a problem for the snooty folks who lived around Oglethorpe Square. So, the plucky Episcopalians picked up the building and moved it over here.

Sometime around 1857, before the church was located on Troup Square, the choir director during that time, James Pierpont, wrote a song called “One Horse Open Sleigh” – a tune we know today as “Jingle Bells.” A historical marker declares this, therefore, as the birthplace of the song although there is some question about whether he wrote it here or not.

On the east side of the square is the Myers Drinking Fountain, a reproduction of the original, which was gifted to the city in 1897 by former mayor Herman Myers, and installed in Forsyth Park. That fountain was for people enjoying the park and it stayed there until the 1980s when it was removed for maintenance and lost. This reproduction was added to Troup Square in the 1980s but with one key difference – the basins are at ground level because its a drinking fountain for dogs. For many years they had a blessing of the animals here.

By the 1960s, the square became derelict, overgrown and untended with a playground in the middle of it that was vandalized and in poor condition.  The city planned to remove most of the square and put a bus lane through the middle of it, but in 1968, landscape architects Clermont Huger Lee, one of the first female architects in Georgia, and Mills B. Lane developed a plan to rehabilitate the square in the style of an English garden.

They added the Armillary Sphere at the center, something that caused no small amount of controversy since at the time it was the only “modern” statue in any of the squares. Supported on a base of six turtles, it has the 12 zodiac symbols on one iron circle and numerals on another and acts as a sun dial.

The main character in the Interitas series lives on this square and the Armillary plays a major role in the mythology.