Fun Fact Friday

If you’ve ever taken a tour of Historic Savannah, you might have heard that the statues that use a horse contain a clue to how the person it’s memorializing died. The story goes that a statue/monument with a horse that has all four feet on the ground represents the rider died of natural causes, if one of the horse’s feet is in the air the rider sustained wounds on the battlefield and died some time later from those wounds, and if the horse is reared with two feet in the air the rider died on the battlefield. While this is true for many Civil War Era statues, it seems the “horse code” did not become standardized as was hoped, meaning you will find statues and monuments here in Savannah (and across the country) that fit this code and others that do not so you should always read the placard and not just look at the image to learn about the honoree.