They called the common by the river the Irish Green. Not on any official map, but everyone in the Old Fort knew the name. From the 1840s onward, if you walked the bluff above the Savannah River at dusk, you heard Wexford accents drifting out of brick tenements, the clang of the Phoenix Iron Works, and the call of stevedores still loading cotton under gaslight. By 1860 as many as one in three white households in the city were Irish-born, a figure that would feel astonishing anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line.
The story of the Irish in Savannah, Georgia is not a footnote to the city’s Spanish moss and antebellum squares. It is one of the central threads of how this port became what it is.
Old Fort and Yamacraw: The Place
The Irish did not spread evenly across Savannah’s famous grid of squares. They clustered in three working districts hard against the river. Old Fort sat on the east side of today’s Historic District, around present-day Trustees Garden and the green now called Emmet Park.
On the west side lay Yamacraw and, beside it, Frogtown, low ground near the Central of Georgia rail yards. These were not the genteel Savannah of guidebooks. They were crowded, flood-prone, and close to the wharves and depots where the work was.
That proximity was the whole point. A man could leave a one-room house in the Old Fort and be hauling cotton bales on River Street, or laying track for the railroad, within minutes.
How Savannah Became Irish
Before the Famine Wave
The Irish were in Georgia almost from the colony’s founding in 1733. The earliest arrivals were largely Protestant, often Presbyterians from the north of Ireland, and many entered Savannah’s merchant class rather than its laboring ranks.
By the early nineteenth century these established Irish families were prosperous enough to notice newer, poorer countrymen arriving by ship. In response, forty-four prominent men organized the Hibernian Society of Savannah on March 17, 1812, incorporated by the Georgia General Assembly that December, expressly to give aid to needy Irish immigrants. It remains one of the oldest Irish organizations in the United States.
The Society also lit the spark for the city’s signature tradition. In 1824 its president, James Hunter, invited local Irishmen to attend Mass and then march through the streets in honor of Saint Patrick. That procession is the one the modern parade traces itself to.
The Famine Arrives
The character of Irish Savannah changed utterly with the Great Famine. Between 1845 and 1849 the failure of the potato killed roughly a million people in Ireland and drove a million more abroad.
Crucially for Savannah, shipping firms in County Wexford in the southeast of Ireland began advertising passage directly to Georgia. Cotton ships that carried Savannah’s crop to Liverpool and beyond needed ballast and paying passengers for the return leg, and Wexford emigrants filled the holds. It became the single largest direct movement of people from Ireland to this one American city.
The numbers tell the rest. By 1854 about 51 percent of Savannah’s residents were foreign-born, and the Irish made up some 63 percent of that total. Among them was a ten-year-old named William Kehoe, who had arrived from County Wexford in 1842 with his parents and seven siblings and settled in the Old Fort.
The Community at Its Peak
Famine-era Savannah ran on Irish muscle. Irish laborers had helped build the Central of Georgia Railway, which reached the outskirts of Macon by 1843, and the rail depot itself formed the rough boundary between Yamacraw and Frogtown.
On the riverfront, Irish longshoremen worked nine-hour days loading cotton, rice, lumber, rosin, and turpentine. They organized early, and the Irish-founded Workingmen’s Benevolent Association kept a working alliance with the Black Workingmen’s Union Association on the same wharves, a rare cross-racial labor compact in the antebellum South.
Faith anchored everything. The Catholic congregation that became the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist swelled with Irish families, and in 1850 Pope Pius IX created the Diocese of Savannah under its first bishop, the Irish-born Francis Xavier Gartland. Chain migration did the rest: each family that found a footing in the Old Fort wrote home, and the next cousin or neighbor from Wexford followed across the Atlantic.
This was the same engine that built Irish enclaves all over the continent, from the tenement blocks of the Irish of South Boston to the copper-mining camps of Butte, Montana. Savannah’s version simply ran on cotton and rail instead of textiles or ore.
Fever, War, and Change
Living packed into the low, damp districts by the river came at a terrible price. When yellow fever swept Savannah in 1854, it tore through the Irish quarters. Of roughly 650 dead, 293 were Irish-born, and Bishop Gartland himself died ministering to the sick.
The Civil War and the slow decline of King Cotton reshaped the waterfront economy in the decades that followed. Yet unlike many northern enclaves that emptied within a generation, the Savannah Irish did not scatter. They moved up and out into the wider city, trading the tenements of the Old Fort for ownership and office.
William Kehoe is the clearest emblem of that climb. The boy from Wexford apprenticed in an iron foundry, rose to foreman, inherited and then bought out the Phoenix Iron Works, and in 1892 built a 24-room Renaissance Revival mansion on Columbia Square that still stands as the Kehoe House.
The Landmarks of Irish Savannah
Emmet Park, Bay Street at the eastern end of the Historic District. Once the Strand, then the Irish Green for its closeness to the Old Fort, this riverfront common was renamed in 1902 for the Irish patriot Robert Emmet on the centenary of his execution. Wexford-born businessman William Kehoe helped establish it, and it is still the ceremonial heart of Irish Savannah.
Cathedral Basilica of Saint John the Baptist, 222 East Harris Street on Lafayette Square. The mother church of Savannah’s Catholics, rebuilt in French Gothic style and dedicated in 1876. Its interior Celtic trinity knots openly acknowledge the Irish families and Irish-trained priests who filled and led the diocese.
The Hibernian Society of Savannah, founded 1812. Still active more than two centuries on, the Society holds an anniversary dinner every March 17 whose past guests have included Presidents Taft, Truman, and Carter.
The Kehoe House, 123 Habersham Street on Columbia Square. William Kehoe’s 1892 mansion, later a funeral parlor and once owned by football star Joe Namath, now a historic inn. It is the most visible monument to Irish success in the city.
The Forsyth Park fountain, Forsyth Park. Each spring it is dyed green to open the St. Patrick’s season, the first of the city’s fountains to take on the color. The greening here is the public starting gun for the celebrations.
The Savannah St. Patrick’s Day Parade, through the Historic District. Traced to that 1824 procession, it is today among the largest St. Patrick’s Day parades in the United States, drawing crowds approaching a million people. It is the single loudest expression of the city’s Irish identity.
Where the Savannah Irish Came From
More than any other place, the Savannah Irish came from County Wexford in the southeastern corner of Ireland. The link was practical before it was sentimental: Wexford shipping agents advertised direct passage to Georgia, and the port-to-port cotton trade made Savannah an unusually reachable destination from the southeast Irish coast.
Families tended to settle near others from the same parish back home, so a street in the Old Fort might hold a cluster of Wexford neighbors who had simply moved together across an ocean. That same logic of following the people you knew shaped Irish quarters elsewhere, from the Irish Channel of New Orleans to the Scots-Irish frontier traced in the Cape Fear region of North Carolina.
Irish Savannah Today
The tenements of the Old Fort are long gone, and Trustees Garden and Emmet Park are now polished stops on the tourist route. But the heritage did not fade with the buildings. About one in eleven people in Chatham County still report Irish ancestry, more than for any nationality other than English.
The living culture shows up on the calendar. The Savannah Irish Festival, begun in 1993, fills a weekend each February with traditional music, dance, and storytelling, and in 2026 marked its 32nd year. A few weeks later the four-week St. Patrick’s season culminates in the great parade, when the fountains run green and the whole city claims a little Wexford blood.
What survives in Savannah is not a single Irish street you can still walk. It is something more diffuse and more durable: a Catholic cathedral, a 200-year-old society, an iron-built mansion, and a riverside green that the city has never stopped calling by its old Irish name.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Irish settle in Savannah, Georgia?
The Irish settled in Savannah, Georgia because the cotton port offered steady labor on the wharves and railroads, and because Wexford shipping firms advertised direct passage from Ireland to the city. Famine refugees in particular crowded into the riverside districts of Old Fort, Yamacraw, and Frogtown, where the work was close at hand.
Is Savannah still an Irish city today?
Savannah retains a strong Irish identity, even though the old enclaves have dispersed. About one in eleven Chatham County residents claim Irish ancestry, and the city hosts one of the largest St. Patrick’s Day parades in the United States along with an annual Irish Festival.
What are the most famous Irish landmarks in Savannah?
The best-known Irish landmarks in Savannah are Emmet Park, once the Irish Green of the Old Fort, and the Cathedral Basilica of Saint John the Baptist, long the spiritual home of the city’s Irish Catholics. The Kehoe House and the Hibernian Society of Savannah, founded in 1812, are also enduring monuments to the community.
Where in Ireland did the Savannah Irish come from?
Most of the famine-era Savannah Irish came from County Wexford in the southeast of Ireland, drawn by shipping agents who advertised direct passage to Georgia. Earlier arrivals included Presbyterian families from the north of Ireland who entered Savannah’s merchant class.
When did the Irish first arrive in Savannah?
Irish settlers were present in Savannah almost from the colony’s founding in 1733, and a sizable Irish merchant community existed by the early 1800s. The largest wave came during and after the Great Famine of 1845 to 1849, transforming the working districts of the city.
If your family’s story passed through the Old Fort, Yamacraw, or any of the places the Irish made home, Atlas of Home can help you trace that journey. From a Wexford quayside to the Savannah River, to wherever you are now. Explore your story →
Sources and further reading: Emmet Park (Wikipedia) and the Georgia Historical Society.