Many folks arriving in the Lowcountry land with a bump and a tire squeak at Savannah International Airport. They’re all excited about heading to the golf courses on Hilton Head or the quaint charm and good food of Savannah itself. The Lowcountry pulls people in like moths to a summer porch light, but there’s a quaint little secret most travelers don’t know. The landing bump and tire squeak signaling safe arrival will have occurred in a graveyard if the airplane is landing in an easterly direction on Runway 10.
What? Huh? How can that be? No way!…but, lo-and-behold, yes way! It’s the kind of story that makes the Lowcountry such an intriguingly unique place, and Savannah is the only airport in the world with gravestones embedded in an active runway. How’s that for a tourist attraction?
As the story goes, back in the 1800s, the land comprising Savannah airport’s western half had been the Dotson family farm known as Cherokee Hills. During World War II, the airport, then called Chatham Field, underwent a major expansion to accommodate bomber training. With the extension of the east/west runway, the western end was going to run right through the Dotson family graveyard, containing approximately one hundred graves. The Dotson descendants worked out an arrangement with the federal government, and most of the graves were moved to the Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah. (Of note, the Bonaventure Cemetery was once home to the 1938 bronze sculpture, “Bird Girl,” by Sylvia Shaw Judson, a picture of which adorns the iconic cover of John Berendt’s 1994 blockbuster novel, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. City authorities moved the statue to Savannah’s Telfair Museum in 1997 to protect it against vandalism and possible theft.)
It was important to the Dotson descendants that the family patriarch and matriarch would remain on their land. Thus, dear old Richard and Catherine Dotson continue their eternal repose smack dab under the approach end of Runway 10. Concurrently, two beloved relatives, Daniel Hueston and John Dotson, remain in their graves to the side of the runway in the grass boundary.
I had known about the graves for several years before I actually saw them. A few years ago, I was flying my L-19 into Savannah after completing a conservation mission for SouthWings, https://www.southwings.org/, and the airport traffic was landing on Runway 10. There were no airliners breathing down my back, and the nearest approaching aircraft was a Delta flight descending several miles out. I asked the tower if I could fly off centerline on my approach so I could see the graves. The controller chuckled and said it would be fine just so long as I eventually landed on the runway and expedited my turnout. Easy peasy because the plane I was flying can land in a few hundred feet, and Runway 10 is 9,351 feet long…let alone being 150 feet wide.
And there they were. The Dotson gravestones were clearly visible just a scooch from the big white number 10 runway designator and right in the middle of the countless skid marks caused by aircraft tires hitting the runway surface. The Hueston/Dotson graves were also visible nestled in the grass just to the south.
I was emotionally moved by seeing the graves. There is something mystical and affectionate in the whole idea of their being where they are. It’s one of those things that makes the Lowcountry such a special place, and most folks never know what they’re missing when they touch down at the end of their flight into Savannah.
After flying past the graves, I slipped my airplane onto the centerline and added a few tire squeaks of my own. As I turned off the runway onto taxiway Charlie 1, I heard the tower say, “Delta thirty-one fifty, cleared to land.” Just another ho-hum day for arriving travelers and the Dotsons at Savannah International Airport.
Here’s an article with a video of the graves taken from a small airplane on landing: https://onemileatatime.com/insights/savannah-airport-graves/. Scroll through the article to find the video.