His Body Was Lost
for 116 Years.
Nobody Noticed.

General Nathanael Greene was George Washington's most trusted commander — the general credited with turning the tide of the Revolutionary War in the South. He died at Mulberry Grove plantation outside Savannah on June 19, 1786. He was forty-three years old.

He was buried at Colonial Park Cemetery. And then his body disappeared. Not from records. Not from memory. From the physical ground. For 116 years nobody could find which vault held the remains of the second most important general of the American Revolution.

In 1901 workers discovered his remains in the Graham-Mossman family vault — a vault that had nothing to do with the Greene family. How he got there has never been fully explained. In 1902 his remains were moved with full military honors and reinterred beneath the monument in Johnson Square.

Mulberry Grove plantation — where he died — is now owned by the Georgia Ports Authority. The cotton gin was invented there by Eli Whitney while he was a guest of Catherine Greene, Nathanael's widow. The body was lost for 116 years. The plantation became a port facility. Every piece of this story is more complicated than the markers say.