Mercer Williams House Museum

The Mercer Williams House is the address that sold Savannah to the world. Begun in 1860 to designs by the architect John S. Norris for General Hugh Mercer — great-grandfather of the songwriter Johnny Mercer — it was interrupted by the Civil War and finished around 1868 by the cotton merchant John Randolph Wilder; as the house's own history likes to point out, nobody named Mercer ever lived in it. It passed through Savannah's Shriners and years of neglect before the antiques dealer and restorationist Jim Williams bought it in 1969 and spent two years bringing it back. Williams saved dozens of houses across the city over three decades, and he filled this one with the collection the tour now shows: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century furniture, English and American portraits, old master drawings and Chinese export porcelain. In 1981 he shot his young assistant Danny Hansford in the study, and four murder trials later — ending in acquittal — John Berendt turned the case into Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and Clint Eastwood filmed the party scenes in these very rooms. The guided tour covers the ground floor — the foyer, Williams's study, the dining room and the parlors — plus the courtyard and the carriage house, where tours begin and the shop now sits; the upstairs remains private family space. Fit: every Midnight reader, history buffs who like their architecture with a plot, couples doing the Monterey Square circuit, and haunted-Savannah fans who want the real story rather than the ghost version.

What the tour does well is the house itself. Norris's Italianate design is one of the finest residential facades in the district — red brick, tall arched windows with iron balconies, and a commanding corner position on Monterey Square, widely considered the most beautiful of the twenty-two — and Williams's restoration was meticulous enough that the interiors read as a connoisseur's home rather than a museum installation. Guides tell the Midnight story with discretion; the family that still owns the house is careful about how it is presented, so expect a tour that leans toward architecture, collecting and Savannah society, with the 1981 events handled briefly and factually. That restraint is part of the appeal: you are in a private home that happens to be one of the most famous in American nonfiction.

The family history explains the format. After Williams died in 1990, his sister Dorothy Williams Kingery owned the house and opened it for tours, insisting that the shooting itself not be filmed inside when the movie came to town. She died in 2023, and the house remains with her descendants, with the museum run from the carriage house. Photography is not allowed inside, tours are limited to the ground floor and garden, and the house is typically closed on holidays. Visitors who have read the book should reread the chapters on the Christmas party and the study before they go — the rooms make the prose suddenly physical.

Making the most of Monterey Square: arrive a few minutes early to walk the square, where the Pulaski monument stands under some of the district's most photographed oaks and Temple Mickve Israel (one of the oldest Jewish congregations in the country) faces the green. Forsyth Park is three blocks south. Book or buy tickets ahead in spring and October, when tour groups fill the slots, and allow forty-five minutes to an hour. Pair with the Telfair Academy for the Bird Girl and Bonaventure Cemetery for the book's other great setting to complete a Midnight day. A sensible order: the Telfair in the morning, Mercer Williams before lunch, and Bonaventure in the softer afternoon light, with dinner back in the district. Fans who want the full literary circuit can also walk past the book's other addresses on the squares, but the house tour is the only one of them you can actually enter, and it is the one that rewards the trip. Readers who have not read the book will still enjoy the tour as a first-rate decorative-arts visit.