Wright Square and Tomochichi Memorial
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Wright Square contains one of Savannah’s most revealing memory disputes. Yamacraw leader Tomochichi was buried here after his death in 1739, and colonial Georgians honored him with a public funeral.
Later, his original grave marker disappeared as the square was redesigned. In the nineteenth century, a monument to railway founder William Washington Gordon was placed near the center. In 1899, the Colonial Dames of Georgia installed the granite boulder memorial you see for Tomochichi.
The sequence matters. Tomochichi was essential to Savannah’s early colonial diplomacy, yet urban commemoration later elevated a nineteenth-century industrial figure more prominently. A later generation then attempted to restore Indigenous memory without removing the newer monument.
That is how public memory often works: not by replacing one clean story with another, but by accumulating competing objects.
Tomochichi should neither be romanticized as a passive “friend of the colonists” nor reduced to a victim without agency. He negotiated strategically in a rapidly changing Indigenous and imperial world.
Look around the square and notice that historical importance is not measured by monument size. Sometimes the smaller marker represents the older claim to the ground.