This representative 1850s commercial building with a cast-iron shopfront served as the military headquarters of General J. W. Geary, post commandant during the Union occupation of Savannah from December 1864 to December 1865. The obliquely angled glass-fronted rooftop skylight dates to 1931, when the building’s second floor was converted into a federal government cotton classification and grading office, its true-north-facing skylight admitting light without shadows. The neighboring buildings, originally houses (c. 1822), at

15–23 E. Bay Street retain the scale of early-nineteenth-century Savannah and its waterfront architecture.