Broughton Street, the shopping street, crosses Bull Street in the downtown section, and looks ashamed of itself as it does so, for it is about as commonplace a looking street as one may see.  There is simply nothing about it of distinction save its rather handsome name.

Elsewhere, however, there are several skyscrapers, most of them good looking buildings.  It seemed to me also that I had never seen so many banks as in Savannah, and I am told that it is, indeed, a great banking city, and that the record of the Savannah banks for weathering financial storms is very fine.  On a good many corners where there are not banks there are clubs, and some of these clubs are delightful and thoroughly metropolitan in character.  I know of no city in the North, having a population corresponding to that of Charleston or of Savannah, which has clubs comparable with the best clubs of these cities, or of New Orleans.  When it is considered that of the population of these southern cities approximately one half, representing negroes, must be deducted in considering the population from which eligibles must be drawn, the excellence of southern clubs becomes remarkable in the extreme.  Savannah, by the way, holds one national record in the matter of clubs.  It had the first golf club founded in America.  Exactly when the club was founded I cannot say, but Mr. H.H.  Bruen, of Savannah, has in his possession an invitation to a golf club ball held in the old City Hall in the year 1811.

The commercial ascendancy of Savannah over Charleston is due largely to natural causes.  The port of Savannah drains exports from a larger and richer territory than is tapped by Charleston, though new railroads are greatly improving Charleston’s situation in this respect.  Savannah is a shipping port for cotton from a vast part of the lower and central South, and is also a great port for lumber, and the greatest port in the world for “naval stores.”  I did not know what naval stores were when I went to Savannah.  The term conjured up in my mind pictures of piles of rope, pulleys and anchors.  But those are not naval stores.  Naval stores are gum products, such as resin and turpentine, which are obtained from the long-leafed pines of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Florida.  The traveler through these States cannot have failed to notice gashes on the tree-trunks along the way.  From these the resinous sap exudes and is caught in cups, after which it is boiled, there in the woods, and thus separated into turpentine, resin and pitch.  Vast quantities of these materials are stored on the great modern docks of Savannah.  It is said that owing to wasteful methods, the long-leafed pine forests are being rapidly destroyed, and that this industry will die out before very long because the eager grabbers of to-day’s dollars, having no thought for the future, fail to practise scientific forestry.