
The Exchange Hotel in
Montgomery, Alabama
Montgomery is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Alabama. Named for Continental Army major general Richard Montgomery, it stands beside the Alabama River on the Gulf Coastal Plain. The population was 2 ...
, United States, was a luxury hotel, first built in 1846 and finished in 1847. The hotel burned down in 1904 and was rebuilt in 1906; its second incarnation was demolished in the 1970s. The hotel was a hotbed of politics; during the
American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and the Confederate States of A ...
it housed, for a while, the Confederate government, and throughout the 20th century it was the place where politicians and business men met to make deals. Among the early owners were "Messrs. St. Lanier & Son"; Sterling Lanier was the grandfather of
Sidney Lanier
Sidney Clopton Lanier (February 3, 1842 – September 7, 1881) was an American musician, poet and author. He served in the Confederate States Army as a private, worked on a blockade-running ship for which he was imprisoned (resulting in his catch ...
and his brother Clifford, who both worked at the hotel as clerks. After the Civil War, Clifford managed and co-owned the hotel.
History
The hotel was started by a group of local businessmen who had the company of Robinson and Bardwell build it (they were also responsible for the
Alabama State Capitol
The Alabama State Capitol, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the First Confederate Capitol, is the state capitol building for Alabama. Located on Capitol Hill, originally Goat Hill, in Montgomery, it was declared a National ...
), with architect Samuel Holt, on the corner of Montgomery and Commerce Streets. The work started in 1846 and was finished in the fall of 1847. When the first State Capitol burned down, on December 14, 1849, the legislature was in session in the Exchange. In 1855, Sterling Lanier (who owned three hotels in the
American South
The Southern United States (sometimes Dixie, also referred to as the Southern States, the American South, the Southland, Dixieland, or simply the South) is census regions United States Census Bureau. It is between the Atlantic Ocean and the ...
) assumed ownership, and a variety of managers followed. William B. Lanier (one of Sterling's sons), and his sister's husband, Abram P. Watt, operated the hotel for a while, with "meetings of the legislature and party conventions contribut
nglargely to the business of the hotel". On the eve of the
American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and the Confederate States of A ...
, Watt had eight enslaved African Americans who labored in the hotel. Clifford Lanier, Lanier's grandson and the brother of poet
Sidney Lanier
Sidney Clopton Lanier (February 3, 1842 – September 7, 1881) was an American musician, poet and author. He served in the Confederate States Army as a private, worked on a blockade-running ship for which he was imprisoned (resulting in his catch ...
, came into ownership (with an R. L. Watt) in January 1872. Historian Matthew Powers Blue, whose history of the city was published in 1878, noted that "few hotels have as high a reputation, well constructed, well officered, and complete in all of the appointments."
During the
American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and the Confederate States of A ...
, when Montgomery (briefly) was the capital of the Confederacy, president
Jefferson Davis
Jefferson F. Davis (June 3, 1808December 6, 1889) was an American politician who served as the only President of the Confederate States of America, president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865. He represented Mississippi in the Unite ...
had his headquarters (and his living accommodations) at the Exchange. Secessionist
William Lowndes Yancey
William Lowndes Yancey (August 10, 1814July 27, 1863) was an American politician in the Antebellum South. As an influential "Fire-Eater", he defended slavery and urged Southerners to secede from the Union in response to Northern antislavery ...
introduced Davis to the Montgomery citizens from the hotel balcony on Commerce Street, where he said, "the man and the hour have met", a phrase that was later remembered with a plaque in the hotel.
The procession for Davis's inauguration as
president of the Confederate States
The president of the Confederate States was the head of state and head of government of the unrecognized breakaway Confederate States. The president was the chief executive of the federal government and commander-in-chief of the Confederate A ...
, on February 18, 1862, started at the Exchange, and the order to
fire on Fort Sumter was issued by Davis in the Exchange, and then carried over the telegraphic office in the
Winter Building, across the street.
Davis continued to patronize the hotel. He was there in April 1879, and spoke there on the piazza. He stopped there again in April 1886,
when he was invited to lay the cornerstone for the
Confederate Memorial Monument, next to the Capitol, and in his speech made reference to his 1861 introduction to the citizenry of Montgomery. A bronze plaque on the second floor (of the new building) commemorated Davis's sojourn there, and a plaque put up by the
Daughters of the Confederacy in 1913, on the side of Montgomery Street, commemorated his inauguration speech.
Sidney Lanier worked at the hotel right after the Civil War, from 1865 to 1867.
He was a night clerk, and stories are told of him playing the flute at night; he wrote ''Tiger-Lilies'', his first novel, at the Exchange. One of its guests was W. J. Scott, the editor of the Atlanta-based weekly ''
Scott's Monthly'', and after Lanier recognized his name in the register he introduced himself to Scott, who went on to publish a number of Lanier's poems. In 1887, US president
Grover Cleveland
Stephen Grover Cleveland (March 18, 1837June 24, 1908) was the 22nd and 24th president of the United States, serving from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897. He was the first U.S. president to serve nonconsecutive terms and the first Hist ...
visited Montgomery, and spoke from the hotel balcony.
The hotel was demolished in 1904. The new Exchange was finished in 1906 (or 1905
); the four-story building was replaced by an eight-story building.
President
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919), also known as Teddy or T.R., was the 26th president of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909. Roosevelt previously was involved in New York (state), New York politics, incl ...
visited the hotel and spoke from the porch, in 1905 and 1912.
By 1960, the Lanier family still had a stake in the hotel. It was torn down in 1974, at a time when motels were replacing hotels and Montgomery's nightlife had declined. A "handsome polished granite and glass building" owned by the Colonial Company was built on the site in the mid-1980s.
[Neeley 19.]
Reputation and demise
According to local writer and newspaper man
Joe Azbell, the hotel started as a locus of power and ended as a "faded rose". It was the place where "determined men walked upon those tile floors, made deals in the chairs of the high-ceiled lobby, decided the future of Alabama government..., and swapped black bags of payoff dough for laws, for fat contracts, for jobs and appointments, and those slight political favors that the yokels back home would never know about". The
Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to KKK or Klan, is an American Protestant-led Christian terrorism, Christian extremist, white supremacist, Right-wing terrorism, far-right hate group. It was founded in 1865 during Reconstruction era, ...
gathered there to "thwart the mongrelization of the races"; Imperial Emperor
Lycurgus Spinks was there in the early 1950s, "doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a corpse of a cause" and holding meetings with dozens of robed Klansmen. Azbell also noted it was a wedding destination in the mid-20th century. But when Alabama governor
Gordon Persons (who had advertised his political career in the Exchange and whose campaign mastermind organized it from the Exchange) built Montgomery's
Southern Bypass, the demise of the Exchange was certain, since the hotel's guests would start using motels on the bypass. In its heyday, it was host to "congressmen, senators, commissioners, mayors, city commissioners" who used the hotel as a "political tool". It was also a place where the police department's vice squad would regularly entrap prostitutes who plied their business in the hotel rooms. A national chain, Milner Hotels, took over the hotel in 1966 and set it up for permanent residents, and for workers with railroad and bus companies.
Nevertheless, the building was demolished eight years later.
References
Bibliography
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{{Coord, 32, 22, 39.61, N, 86, 18, 35.63, W, type:landmark_scale:1000, display=title
Hotels in Alabama
Demolished buildings and structures in Alabama
Buildings and structures in Montgomery, Alabama
Jefferson Davis
Buildings and structures demolished in 1974