Conrad Potter Aiken was born in Savannah on August 5, 1889. He was the eldest of four children of Dr. William Aiken, a prominent physician from New York, and Anna Potter Aiken, the daughter of a Massachusetts Unitarian minister. The family lived at 228 East Oglethorpe Avenue, part of the row of brick townhouses known as Marshall Row, directly across from Colonial Park Cemetery, where young Conrad often played.

On February 27, 1901, when Conrad was eleven, his father shot his mother and then himself, without warning. Conrad was the one who found them. He was sent to live with relatives in Massachusetts and later went to Harvard, where he began a lifelong friendship with T. S. Eliot. He became one of the major American writers of his century. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1930 and the National Book Award for his Collected Poems, and his autobiography Ushant looks back on his destroyed childhood in Savannah. The trauma surfaces in famous stories such as 'Silent Snow, Secret Snow.'

In the early 1960s Aiken was offered his parents' house to live in free of charge. He chose to live next door at 230 instead and spent his last years there with his wife, the painter Mary Hoover. He was named Georgia's poet laureate in 1973 and died that August. He rests beside his parents in Bonaventure Cemetery, where a marble bench he had placed there reads 'Cosmos Mariner, Destination Unknown.' A historical marker stands in front of the house. Both houses are private residences, so please view them from the sidewalk.