Maxwell House Hotel

The Maxwell House began with enslaved labor. Work started in 1859 on a design by Isaiah Rogers, and the unfinished brick shell served the occupying Union army as barracks and a prison hospital. When John Overton Jr. resumed construction after the war, Nashvillians called the five-story hotel Overton's Folly. It opened in 1869 with 240 rooms, steam heat and a bath on every floor, at four dollars a day with meals, and grew famous for a Christmas dinner of Cumberland black bear and Tennessee opossum.

What the plaque says

Maxwell House Hotel On this site stood the Maxwell House Hotel built by John Overton in 1859. It was destroyed by fire on Christmas Day, 1961. After wartime use as a barracks, hospital and prison, it was formally opened as a hotel in 1869. Presidents Andrew Johnson, Rutherford Hayes, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson lodged here, as did a host of celebrities from the world of business, politics, the arts and military services.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — steps away
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• Ryman Auditorium — steps away
  The 1892 brick tabernacle in downtown Nashville that was the Grand Ole Opry's home from 1943 to 1974, now a National Historic Landmark and working concert hall.
• National Museum of African American Music — 0.2 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 0.3 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.

More markers nearby

• First Masonic Hall — steps away
• Downtown Presbyterian Church — steps away
• Birth of Bluegrass — steps away
• War Memorial Auditorium Building — 0.2 mi