Cotton Exchange prices shaped world trade from 1887

Inside this building, merchants set the market price for the world's second-busiest cotton port. Savannah was the leading cotton port on the Atlantic, moving more than two million bales every year at its peak. Boston architect William Gibbons Preston won a competition against ten other designers to build this red brick and terracotta hall, which opened in 1887 and now serves as the headquarters of the Savannah Chamber of Commerce.

The building stands on iron pillars directly above an existing public road, allowing street traffic to pass underneath. In front of the building, an ornamental iron railing encloses a grass plot. The panels hold medallions showing the faces of statesmen, authors, and poets, moved here from the antebellum Wetter House in Savannah.

Behind the hall, the iron and stone bridgeways of Factors Walk stretch down the forty-foot bluff where Oglethorpe founded the town. Cotton factors—the brokers who graded, financed, stored, and sold the harvest—worked in the offices lining those lower passages.

The steep bluff gave ships good anchorage, but the river's fast current made building stable wharves difficult. Early builders sank timber cribs packed with ballast stone and brick rubble to secure the bank. In the nineteenth century, steam power made driving piles into the river bottom cheap and reliable, allowing heavy stone wharves to replace the older cribs. The city ended solid bulkhead construction entirely in 1874, passing an ordinance that required all new waterfront wharves to sit on driven piles.