Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace Audio Tour
Welcome to the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace Museum! Use these audio guides to explore our exhibits at your own pace. Just look for the signs indicating each stop along the way, start playback for the related audio presentation in the sections below, and if you like, follow along with the written transcript.
Enjoy your visit!
Stop 1
Juliette Gordon was born in this house on October 31, 1860. She lived to see the dismantling of the institution of slavery, multiple pandemics, and women winning the right to vote. She was a woman who sailed to India, climbed the Egyptian pyramids, and was one of the first people to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower. No matter how far she traveled, this house would always be her home.
We are currently in the basement of the Gordon family home. The house was originally constructed in 1821 for a Savannah mayor, who later sold the house to his niece and her husband – Juliette’s grandparents. When the house was originally built, the basement was used for cleaning, cooking, and storage, as well as housing enslaved people, and later, the free domestic staff who maintained the Gordon family’s lifestyle.
On the wall to the left of the elevator is a copy of the 1860 Slave Schedule. The Slave Schedule was a part of the census and recorded demographic information about the people enslaved here, including their age and race. After the Civil War, most newly emancipated people continued in the same line of work they engaged in while they were enslaved. Some of the people enslaved by the Gordon family stayed on and were paid wages, while others left to seek new opportunities.
Juliette Gordon Low was a woman shaped by her upbringing during Reconstruction, her young adult life as a Gilded Age socialite, and her later adult life as a Progressive Era leader. Juliette founded the Girl Scouts in 1912, during a time of great social change. As we make our way through the house, we will explore how Juliette’s upbringing and Progressive Era reforms influenced the early Girl Scout Movement
Stop 2
This room is one of the home’s original bedrooms and is decorated as it might have been for Juliette’s grandparents, William Washington Gordon I and Sarah Anderson Gordon. Juliette’s grandfather, William, was the first president of the Central of Georgia Railroad and oversaw its construction by immigrants and enslaved laborers. The Gordons were a wealthy and prominent family in Savannah who made their money from the Georgia Railroad, cotton, land, and the labor of enslaved people.
On her mother’s side of the family, Juliette’s grandparents were a founding family of Chicago. Juliette’s grandfather, John H. Kinzie was an Indian Sub-Agent. An Indian Agent was someone who worked as a mediator between the U.S. federal government and Native Americans. Juliette’s grandfather managed annuity payments, organized treaty conferences, and oversaw the forced removal of the Ho-Chunk people and seizure of 2.5 million acres of land upon which the Ho-Chunk Nation had resided.
Juliette was close to both of her grandmothers. Her grandmother and namesake Juliette Kinzie wrote about her experiences on the frontier and shared those stories with Juliette and her siblings when they came to visit. Growing up in Savannah, her parents and grandmother Sarah Gordon raised Juliette with strong values. She was raised to help those in need, and to know that her place was above them.
In the next room, we will discuss Juliette’s childhood and education and how that prepared her for what everyone believed her destiny to be: a socialite, wife, and mother.
Stop 3
Juliette was educated like most young upper-class ladies of her day. She had lessons at home with her mother or a tutor until she was old enough to attend boarding school. When she was twelve years old, Juliette traveled to New Jersey to the same boarding school as her older sister. From age thirteen to seventeen, Juliette and her sisters attended elite boarding schools in Virginia.
At all of these schools, Juliette learned the subjects and skills that would later prepare her for her future role as wife and mother. Piano, drawing, French, German, English grammar, basic mathematics, morality, and religious education are some examples of the core subjects Juliette studied. When Juliette was seventeen, she went to finishing school for courses in dancing, elocution, and etiquette to round off her education and prepare her to enter society as a woman ready to marry.
Just a few short years after completing her education, the tragic death of her younger sister would reacquaint Juliette and a family friend, William Mackey Low. Overcome with grief, Juliette cherished Willy Low’s visits, and the two of them began a, at times, tumultuous romance. They eventually married and moved to England.
Willy Low’s father, Andrew Low, was a British businessman who operated in Savannah. Their familial fortune and wealth were even greater than that of the exceedingly privileged Gordon family. Andrew Low had his son educated in elite English schools with the goal of marrying an aristocratic Englishwoman and further elevating the family's status with a title. However, Willy Low and Juliette Gordon fell in love and Andrew Low died, leaving Willy Low the only male heir of the vast fortune his father had amassed.
Although he was not an aristocrat, Willy Low had many friends among the English nobility, and he and Juliette often hosted parties and gatherings at their home in Warwick known as Wellesbourne. Their guest book is in the glass case in the corner of the room. The pages are filled with a “who’s who” of English society life. All except the final page, which was signed later by Girl Guides and Girl Scouts.
As you make your way to the next stop, check out the other display case filled with objects from Juliette’s wedding and married life. Willy Low had a diamond brooch made for each of Juliette’s bridesmaids with the wedding year and a daisy flower – a reference to Juliette’s nickname: Daisy.
Stop 4
When Juliette married, she chose to have the wedding on the same day as her parents’ anniversary for good luck. Juliette’s parents, Willie and Nellie, were quite different. Willie was described as “mild” and “even” and Nellie… the exact opposite. But their ideals and principles were aligned in a way that made them perfect for one another.
Willie was educated in the North and attended Yale. Nellie was born and raised in Chicago but met Willie on a visit to Connecticut while he was in school. After they married, they moved to Savannah. A few years later, the Civil War began, and Willie went to fight for the Confederacy. When he was still in school, Willie began to believe that the institution of slavery was wrong, but as he became involved in the family business and began directly benefiting from the enslavement of others, he changed his mind. After the Civil War, Willie was forced to restructure his business without the use of enslaved labor. He also made generous donations to the reconstruction of Savannah and joined the Savannah Benevolent Association, which was founded to provide aid during pandemics and other emergencies.
Nellie came from a line of educated women and was a strong supporter of women’s education. She founded the Georgia chapter of the Colonial Dames Society, and one of their first causes was women’s admittance into college. Nellie also supported the Red Cross and other nursing institutions.
In 1898, during the Spanish-American war, nearly the whole family served. Juliette’s brothers joined the military, and Brigadier General Willie Gordon was stationed in Camp Miami in terrible conditions. The camp struggled with disease and unclean drinking water. Nellie and Juliette traveled to the camp to lend their aid by caring for the sick.
One of Willie’s favorite poems summarizes how he and his family viewed service and duty:
“For the cause that lacks assistance,
For the wrongs that need resistance,
For the future in the distance,
And the good that I can do.”
Feels very “Girl Scout,” doesn’t it?
Juliette was raised by parents who believed in hands-on service and action. Her husband, Willy Low, was more traditional and believed that it was the duty of the wealthy to care for others monetarily but not work with them directly. Juliette’s work with the poor in Warwickshire and factory girls in south London was just one point of contention in their unhappy marriage. After a beginning that felt like, quote: “rushing at pleasure without time to breathe” Juliette and Willy Low’s marriage devolved into sadness and resentment.
Between Juliette’s chronic illnesses, Willy Low’s gambling and drinking, the couple’s inability to have children, and their incompatible personalities, Juliette and Willy Low struggled to find common ground. Then, after fifteen years of marriage, Willy Low brought his mistress into their home, forcing Juliette to leave. They separated, but before the divorce was finalized, Willy Low died and Juliette became a widow. Juliette was left wondering how she could reconcile the life she’s always dreamt of with the reality of widowhood and scandal.
In the next room, we will learn where Juliette’s life led and how a chance meeting changed the world.
Stop 5
You are standing in Juliette’s adult bedroom filled with her personal belongings and artifacts from her travels. In the corner of the room, near the fireplace, is a parasol she brought back from Paris and a spear from a trip to Egypt. Juliette had a vast network of friends, many of whom were stationed throughout the British Empire in places like Egypt and India. It was not unusual for women at the turn of the century to travel, in fact, it was becoming a booming business.
Juliette was also never truly alone during these trips. Whether she was making a solo journey or in the company of friends or relatives, she had servants carrying luggage, finding transportation, unpacking, repacking, and doing other tasks related to the labor of travel.
At this time, it was also common for young women to take a European tour in the company of a chaperone, sometimes a male relative or a matronly female relation. In 1908, Juliette accompanied her niece and another young woman on a tour of Europe and India. They stopped in France, Pompeii, and Egypt before beginning a whirlwind journey through British colonial India. On top of the chest of drawers between the vanity table and easel is a carved coral statuette of a buddha that Juliette brought back as a souvenir from a trip to India.
When she was not traveling, Juliette continued to divide her time between America and the UK. Since her husband’s death, she struggled to find purpose. She felt too old to try another romantic relationship, and her lifelong illness made her feel, in her words, useless. Then, one fateful day, when Juliette was in England for the coronation of King George V, she attended what would turn out to be a fateful luncheon. At this event, she sat next to Sir Robert Baden Powell.
He told her all about his work with the Boy Scouts and how his sister, Agnes, started a similar organization for girls called Girl Guides. Juliette immediately felt that she should be involved and jumped right in, starting three different troops, also called patrols, for girls with very different lives.
In London, Juliette’s patrols were divided by social class. One patrol was for girls from wealthy families and one for factory girls like the ones Juliette had volunteered with years earlier. In Scotland, her patrol was comprised of girls who lived in rural Glen Lyon. Many of her girls in Glen Lyon left the region to work in city factories to support their families. Juliette wanted to help them stay home and make money within their own communities. She and her Girl Guides learned the art of spinning thread from sheep’s wool and sold the thread to an arts-and-crafts shop in London to give the girls income.
The mantle holds a photograph of Juliette’s Scottish Girl Guides making a fire and a small, glazed figurine of a girl threading a needle. Juliette made this piece during an art lesson for her Scottish Girl Guides, using one of the girls as the model.
Juliette was an avid artist. As a girl, she painted, sketched, and doodled. Later, she studied painting and sculpting in New York, London, and Paris. Art was a lifelong passion and pursuit, but never a profession. Women of Juliette’s social class did not typically have professions. They had clubs and causes they supported but rarely traded their labor in exchange for money.
The next stop is the dining room downstairs where you will learn more about the people who worked in the Gordon household.
Stop 6
This is the dining room, where the Gordon family ate their meals and hosted friends and influential people, and a space where enslaved and paid domestic staff worked. Food was prepared by the cook in the basement, where you began your tour, and sent up in a dumbwaiter to the butler’s pantry, where the elevator is currently located. As you move around this space, notice that it is in the process of being set for dinner. Think about the labor and planning necessary to pull off elaborate gatherings and how different people would have moved through this space.
Over the years, many domestic staff worked for the Gordons, but today we’re going to focus on two of the people we know the most about: a cook, Eliza Henry, and the butler Edward Morrison.
After the Civil War, there was an influx of newly freed African Americans from rural areas making their way into cities like Savannah. One such person was Eliza Henry, who worked as a cook for the Gordon family for around thirty years. Eliza was born into slavery in Liberty County, Georgia and was an adult with grown children by the end of the war. When Eliza knocked on the Gordon’s door looking for work, according to family stories, Nellie “liked her face” and hired her straight away, even though Eliza told Nellie she didn’t know how to cook. As a cook, Eliza oversaw the planning and preparation of meals, keeping inventory of the storeroom, purchasing goods at markets, and managing other kitchen staff.
Despite not knowing how to cook when she was hired, Eliza’s hard work and talent soon made a dinner invitation to the Gordon home a must-have.
Eliza worked for the Gordons during Juliette’s childhood until her retirement around 1900. After she retired from the Gordons’ service, they arranged for her to rent a house they owned. Her grandsons sometimes helped with the rent. When she died, the Gordon family held a funeral for Eliza in the basement of the home, paid for her casket and headstone, and Nellie knitted her burial shroud.
A few years before Eliza retired, in 1894, Edward Morrison began working for the Gordons as a butler. Edward Morrison was born right at the end of the Civil War and came into the world at a turning point for Black Americans. He was born at the juncture of the end of slavery but before Jim Crow laws were put in place to limit the newly won freedoms of Black Americans. We know that Edward Morrison moved to Savannah as a teenager, likely to pursue an education, and registered to vote. After schooling, Edward Morrison began working as a butler.
As a butler, Morrison was responsible for managing the other male staff, dressing the male Gordon family members if there was no valet, keeping the serving ware polished, setting the table, stocking the wine and spirits, and coordinating meals with the cook, who for his first few years, was Eliza Henry. According to Gordon family stories, after about fifteen years of service, Morrison left to start his own catering business but would come back to assist the Gordons when needed, like when President Taft stayed with the Gordons during his 1909 tour of the Southern states.
Shortly after Willie’s death in 1912, Morrison returned to work for Nellie permanently as a butler and remained in the employment of the Juliette’s brothers either as a butler in their homes or as a porter at their business until retirement.
Both Eliza Henry and Edward Morrison worked for the Gordon family for around thirty years before they retired. In order to tell the stories of their lives, we have used stories from Gordon family members and city records. From these, we’ve been able to piece together their biographies, but without firsthand accounts from Eliza and Morrison themselves, we will never know how they saw the world, themselves, and the Gordon family. When the Gordons talk about Eliza, they say that she was “like family,” but when your family member retires and is sick and dying, would you make them pay rent? The domestic staff who served the Gordons were “like family,” but they were never “family.” They were employees who the Gordons felt affection for because they worked hard and were reliable.
Eliza Henry’s cooking made an invitation from the Gordon family a must-have and only Edward Morrison’s service would do when entertaining the President. For an influential family like the Gordons, their success when hosting guests was not just due to their well-decorated home and charming personalities, but also the hard work and talents of their domestic staff.
The next stop are the parlor rooms across the hall from the dining room, where, after dinner, Morrison served coffee and other refreshments to the Gordons and their guests.
Stop 7
The family entertained guests visiting their home in the parlors. It was common for wealthy families to decorate their parlors extravagantly to impress visitors, including the first Girl Scouts!
After working with Girl Guides in England, Juliette knew that this program was needed back in the States. She sailed back to Savannah where she called up her cousin, Nina Pape, who was a progressive educator and the head of the Pape School, a well-respected premier school for girls. According to Nina, Juliette called her and said, “I have something for Savannah, for all America, and all the world, and we’re going to start it tonight.” They immediately got to work recruiting their friends and their friends’ children. In the early days, Juliette hosted afternoon teas in these parlors for potential Girl Scouts and their mothers. According to a family story, Juliette had Morrison serve the future Girl Scouts a fancier tea than her mother served the President. After one of the teas, a little girl told her friends that “Miss Daisy” has diamonds hanging from her ceiling.
The first official meeting on March 12, 1912, was held at the Lousia Porter Home, which was a shelter for women and children that provided healthcare and housing. After reciting the promise and the law, the group of eighteen girls walked across the street to the house Juliette had inherited after her husband’s death, which originally belonged to her father-in-law and is now known as the Andrew Low House. Though the house itself was rented to tenants, Juliette arranged for the carriage house to be converted into the First Girl Scout Headquarters and clubhouse for Savannah’s Girl Scout troops. They attended meetings there and started a Girl Scout basketball league in the empty lot next door.
Many of the first eighteen Girl Scouts were students at Nina Pape’s school, where they learned “how to think, not what to think.” Through the pocket doors and above the fireplace is a portrait of Juliette’s mother, Nellie, who was an advocate for women’s education. After founding the Georgia chapter of the Colonial Dames society, in 1889, the year after the Spanish-American War, Nellie used her influence to petition for women to be allowed to attend the University of Georgia.
Attending university or otherwise pursuing higher education was not a future that Nellie imagined for her own children, but for young women of a lower social class, college was an opportunity to provide for themselves and not be as reliant on their families or husbands. The world was changing. Middle-class and some wealthy women were entering the workforce, driving motorcars, leveraging their political power, and fighting for the right to vote. Girl Scouts was founded eight years before American women won the battle for the ballot. Badges like Clerk and Telegrapher have been replaced by Entrepreneurship and STEM badges, but since 1912, the Movement has prepared girls for the future. After all, “The work of today is the history of tomorrow and we are its makers.”
Stop 8
In this room we have artifacts dedicated to the enduring legacy of Juliette Gordon Low. What started with eighteen Savannah girls, is now a Movement of over 2 million current Girl Scouts.
Juliette’s Medal of Freedom awarded to her after her death by President Obama in 2012 hangs by the front door. The Medal of Freedom is the highest honor a civilian can achieve in the United States. The text defines Juliette as an artist, athlete, and trailblazer. We know her as of all those things, but also as a daughter, a sister, a friend, and a beloved aunt.
In Juliette’s time, visitors were welcomed in this front hall. Today, Girl Scouts of the USA welcomes every girl to join our Movement. But that was not always true. When Juliette Gordon Low called up her cousin to start “something for the girls of Savannah, all of America, and all the world,” what did she mean?
Juliette Gordon Low was able to see past the restrictions of her time and place to establish an organization that included girls from different social classes and religions and advocated for equitable participation for girls with disabilities. But when she started Girl Scouts in 1912, she was not able to overcome her learned prejudices to imagine a movement that welcomed girls of all races. It is thanks to the hard work of Black women like Josephine Holloway in Tennessee, Minnie Holley Barnes in West Virginia, Laura Belle Reed McCoy in Connecticut, Murray Atkins Walls in Kentucky, and Mamie George Williams in Savannah, Georgia, that Girl Scouts grew beyond Juliette’s limitations and continued to evolve into an organization this is truly for all girls.
In an unfinished speech, Juliette wrote: “…in spite of my shortcomings we have grown and flourished. Thanks to the solid merits of Girl Scout laws and to the whole heartedness of the captains and leaders who have taken up this work and I say with all my heart, Long Live the Girl Scouts!”
When you’re ready, please proceed to the library for your final stop on the tour.
Stop 9
This room has always been a library. Juliette Gordon Low herself came here to read and imagine, and she borrowed books from these very bookcases to share with the first Girl Scouts. Today the library is dedicated to books and stories written by, for, and about women and girls all over the world. Like this library, the story of Girl Scouts has grown beyond the story of one girl, Juliette Gordon Low, to include the stories of millions of Girl Scouts making their own paths.
Whatever path led you to our museum, thank you for visiting. The Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace Museum is more than a building. It’s a living testament to the resilience, creativity, and leadership of Juliette Gordon Low and the amazing network of women who worked bravely during the Progressive Era to enact change. Juliette once wrote: “I took the first step, and we are all marching on now to great achievements.” Wherever your trail leads, we hope that you take with you the “spirit of Scouting”: the belief that we can work together to make the world a better place, and the determination to do so.
After you have explored the library, a tour guide can show you to the exit.
