Savannah, Georgia: A River Name With Two Rival Roots

Savannah, Georgia, took its name from the river it sits on, and that river’s name has two rival explanations. One traces it to a Native people known as the Savannahs, who lived along its banks. The other says it’s the Spanish word for a grassy plain, and the old books never settled which is right.

A town on a river of the same name

In 1733, James Oglethorpe brought Georgia’s first colonists to Yamacraw Bluff, on the south bank of the river. Charles C. Jones Jr.’s 1883 History of Georgia says a Yamacraw village stood nearby, led by Tomo-chi-chi, and Oglethorpe met with him before settling his people there.

The town and the river shared a name from the start. Jones quotes Baron von Reck, who wrote that he went “to view this rising Town, Savannah, seated upon the Banks of a River of the same Name.” Lucian Lamar Knight’s Georgia’s Landmarks, Memorials and Legends (1913) says it plainly: Savannah “was named for the river which it overlooks.” So the real question is where the river got its name.

The Savannahs on the river

The first answer points to the people who lived there. In the 1890 history of Augusta he wrote with Salem Dutcher, Jones describes a trading post set up by 1716 farther up the river, called Savannah Town and later Fort Moore. “This settlement derived its name from the Sawannos, or Savannahs, a native tribe dwelling upon its banks and giving name to the river which flowed by,” he writes.

Henry Gannett’s federal list of place names, published in 1905, goes a step further and ties those people to the Shawnee: “The name is a Creek corruption of the name of the Shawnee Indians, who formerly lived upon the Savannah River.”

The Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology made the same case at length in its Handbook of American Indians (1910). Its Shawnee entry says the Shawnee of South Carolina “were known to the early settlers of that state as Savannahs,” and that the river “takes its name from this tribe.” It leans on James Adair, who crossed Georgia in 1749 and wrote of the “Savannah r., so termed on account of the Shawano Indians having formerly lived there.” A map by De l’Isle even labels the river “R. des Chouanons.”

Here’s the catch. The same entry admits “a good deal of confusion,” because the Yuchi and the Yamasee, who lived in the same area, “were sometimes also spoken of as Savannah Indians.” The Handbook insists the tribes are distinct, but you can see how the old records got tangled.

The Spanish grassland

The second answer looks at the land instead. Knight writes that the name “was doubtless derived from the Spanish word, ‘sabanna,’ meaning a grassy plain.” He backs it up with a passage from Absalom H. Chappell’s Miscellanies of Georgia (1874). Chappell argued that nobody could stand on the bluff and look out over the flat country around it “without knowing at once that from these plains or savannas came the river’s name.”

That’s a good-looking argument, but it’s an argument from scenery. In the passage Knight quotes, Chappell doesn’t point to any document where the Spanish named the river. The Handbook took on that idea directly. It notes that Gallatin, in an 1836 paper, had called the name Spanish, but argues that almost all the big rivers of the Atlantic slope carried the names of the tribes living on them, and that it wasn’t likely “a Spanish name would have been retained in an English colony.”

Which way the evidence leans

If you line the two up, the Native-name version has more behind it: a specific people placed on the river, a trading post named for them by 1716, and a writer who said in so many words why the river had that name. The Spanish version rests on what the word sounds like and what the land looks like. Still, Knight’s 1913 book called the Spanish root “doubtless,” so the two stories have lived side by side for a long time.

One more thing you might not expect. Jones says that once Augusta was founded nearby, Savannah Town “lost ground as a trading post and eventually fell into decay.” The post named for the Savannahs faded, and the name carried on with the river and the city at its mouth.

Sources & further reading

• Charles C. Jones Jr., The History of Georgia, vol. 1 (1883). Yamacraw Bluff and Tomo-chi-chi (p. 119); von Reck’s “River of the same Name” (p. 170).
• Charles C. Jones Jr. and Salem Dutcher, Memorial History of Augusta (1890), pp. 24-25. Savannah Town, the Sawannos or Savannahs, and the post’s decline after Augusta was founded.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). The Creek form of the Shawnee name.
• Frederick Webb Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, part 2 (1910), Shawnee entry, pp. 532-533. The Savannahs as the Shawnee, Adair’s statement, De l’Isle’s map, the confusion with the Yuchi and Yamasee, and the case against Gallatin’s Spanish reading.
• Lucian Lamar Knight, Georgia’s Landmarks, Memorials and Legends, vol. 1 (1913). The city named for the river and the Spanish “sabanna” (pp. 375-376); Chappell’s argument (p. 380).
• GNIS feature 322590 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Savannah.