Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace, Savannah, Visitor Guide & Things to Do Nearby

The Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace is a historic house museum on Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah, Georgia, where the founder of the Girl Scouts of the USA was born in 1860. Built in the Regency style, it is a National Historic Landmark and one of the most visited house museums in the city's historic district.

The story behind it

The house was built in the early 1820s for James Moore Wayne, who later became a justice of the US Supreme Court. The Gordon family bought it in the 1830s, and their daughter Juliette, known to family as Daisy, was born here and grew up in its rooms.

As an adult she married and spent much of her life between Savannah and Britain. In 1912 she gathered a group of girls in Savannah to start what became the Girl Scouts of the USA, an organisation built around outdoor activity, service and self-reliance. The Girl Scouts later bought the house and restored it, and it has been open to visitors as a museum ever since.

What to look for

• The symmetrical Regency lines of the building, with tall windows and balanced proportions that set it apart from the later Victorian houses nearby.
• The historic markers near the entrance, which explain the house's link to Juliette Gordon Low and its landmark status.
• The corner setting at Oglethorpe Avenue and Bull Street, where you can see how the house sits within Savannah's famous grid of streets and squares.
• The garden behind the house, if it is included in your visit, a quiet reminder of how families lived in these townhouses.

Tips for your visit

• Allow about 30 minutes to look at the outside and the surroundings, and more if you plan to take a tour of the interior.
• The house can be visited inside as a museum, so check current opening hours and tour arrangements before you go.
• Wright Square and the other historic squares are a short walk away, so it fits easily into a wider stroll through the historic district.
• Mornings and late afternoons are usually calmer on the streets around the house, and the light is kinder for photographs.

See it on a quest

You can reach the house on foot as one stop on Murder Mystery: Death in the Shadows in Savannah, a self-guided route through the historic streets. The app tells you about each place as you arrive and sets a puzzle based on what is in front of you, so you look more closely at the building and its surroundings. One ticket covers the whole group, and you can start whenever suits you, with no guide and no set departure time.