The Anderson Street School: Now SCAD’s Anderson Hall 

The city of Savannah was too beautiful even for General William Tecumseh Sherman to destroy by fire. 

In his infamous ‘March to the Sea’ that began soon after his brutal Civil War campaign that captured Atlanta ended in flames and then concluded with the seizure of Savannah’s port facilities, Sherman’s Union Army tore through the heart of Georgia conducting a scorched earth policy of total war.  

Also known as the ‘Savannah Campaign,’ the march lasted from mid-November to mid-December in 1864. Sherman famously presented Savannah to President Abraham Lincoln as a Christmas present. 

In early December, Sherman warned William Hardee, the leader of the Confederate home guard in Savannah, that he needed to lay down arms and surrender the city or face ‘the harshest measures.’ But Hardee chose to escape across the Savannah River with his men instead.  

Sherman meant business. As he stated to Hardee in his dispatch: “[I]…shall make little effort to restrain my army—burning to avenge the national wrong which they attach to Savannah and other large cities which have been so prominent in dragging our country into civil war.”  

Savannah Mayor Richard Dennis Arnold wisely met Sherman’s forces outside the city to agree no resistance would come from residents in exchange for Sherman’s promise to leave the city intact. 

You might say the restoration movement of Savannah was born by Arnold’s decisive decision to surrender Savannah and Sherman’s subsequent restraint from burning the port city to the ground.  

No organization has done more to restore old Savannah buildings back to historic elegance than the Savannah College of Art and Design. SCAD’s Anderson Hall, located in Savannah’s Victorian District, was restored in 1988; another in a long line of renovation efforts.  

The original building served as The Anderson Street School in Savannah and was built in 1896. 

The beautiful school building was designed by Gottfrid Leonard Norrman, a Swedish-born architect working out of Atlanta who was a prominently busy builder throughout the South. A number of his architectural works are now among the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. 

On November 17, 1909, the Atlanta Constitution reported on Norrman’s demise with the headline: ARCHITECT G. L. NORRMAN SPEEDS A FATAL BULLET THROUGH RIGHT TEMPLE. Despondent over his failing health, Norrman decided to ‘check out’ of his room early that day at Atlanta’s Majestic Hotel.  

Born near Anderson Street School around the time it was built, Pulitzer Prize winner and poet laureate of Georgia, Conrad Aiken, once perceptively inscribed: “Basically, it’s good to die to prevent suicide.”