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The Marshall House Reborn

By Rich Wittish

Savannah, Magazine

When real-estate developer John Hardy took his first look at the Broughton Street building that had been The Marshall House hotel, he said to himself: “There’s no way I’m going to touch it.”

The ground floor of the structure had been “chopped up” to accommodate the storefront businesses, and the second, third and fourth floors had been sealed for more than forty years, creating a home for “a lot of pigeons.” The odor of those upper floors, which were unfortunately also the last resting places of many of the birds, had to be smelled to be believed, 48-year-old Hardy said.

The Marshall House, famed in its heyday for its lacy cast iron veranda and rooftop observation deck, had been built in the mid 1800’s by one of Savannah’s most-heralded businesswomen. The hotel had hosted many a notable visitor and was said to have been where one-time boarder Joel Chandler Harris wrote some of his world famous Uncle Remus tales. During Savannah’s occupation by federal troops near the end of the Civil War, the building was used as a hospital for wounded soldiers.

By the late 1990’s, when Hardy saw it for the first time, the once-proud edifice had become, in his words, “a nightmare.”

By mid-1999, Hardy was on the verge of bringing the city a new Marshall House and filling what local historian John Duncan had called “the one gap in what Savannah had to offer people”- accommodations at a truly historic, beautifully restored hotel.

“Now we can hold our heads up high with other historic towns and have a respectable, elegant, nicely located hotel,” said Duncan, a retired professor of history at Armstrong Atlantic State University and the owner of V. and J. Duncan Antique Maps, Prints & Books.

Hardy was steered to the Marshall House by an architect and a real-estate broker who knew the developer was searching for a hotel to refurbish.

A Midwesterner by birth and an architect by training, Hardy had in 1991 formed the John Hardy Group, a hotel development and consulting firm based in Pittsburgh. In 1994, he moved to Atlanta to take advantage of the credibility accrued by being associated with that high-powered Southern city. He “fell in love” with Savannah on his first visit, a consulting trip involving a local motel.

On his second visit to Savannah, he stayed at one of the city’s many bed-and-breakfast inns. He was charmed by the atmosphere of the B7B and the hospitality of its owners but appalled by the fact that his telephone, fax machine, and television did not work properly.

“Nothing service-wise went right,” he said. “I started thinking: ‘What if you had a hotel with the charm of the bed-and-breakfast but with the first-class amenities and technology?”

Thus began Hardy’s quest for the structure that would accommodate such a hotel. “I started looking and couldn’t find a building,” he said. Then Hardy discovered The Marshall House.

The building was “relatively low-priced, but it was a disaster technically,” he said. With its high ceilings, heart-pine floors and intricate moldings, the interior offered that seductive but evanescent quality of all beguiling renovation projects – “potential.” Intrigued, Hardy began with the idea of converting the decrepit structure into a historic hotel replete with modern services, and he worked out a plan “on paper.”

By that time, he had come to realize what a first-class, refurbished old hotel might do to enhance to revitalization of Broughton Street, the long-dormant retail thoroughfare that was just beginning to make a comeback as an upscale shopping district.

“I felt that, if I did change the street,” Hardy said. He figured that, given Savannah’s penchant for restoration, he would receive a good deal of support for the project.

He had also become aware of the historical significance of the hotel, and a concept began to crystallize: creating the new Marshall House as a “living museum” that would give guests a specific feel for the history of Savannah.

Convinced he had a unique project that would work in the existing market, Hardy put together a joint venture consisting of The John Hardy Group; Atlanta-based Centre Properties, which is the equity development affiliate of the Group; Paine Webber Real Estate; and Coastal Hotel Group, which will manage the hotel.

The John Hardy group bought the building for $555,424 in 1998, and work on the $10.3 million restoration project began in May of that year. The original construction schedule called for the hotel to reopen in February 1999, but several delays caused the date to be pushed back to August. Among the delays were unforeseen developments such as the collapse of a wall that had to be rebuilt.

As of late July, a horde of workers was still feverishly engaged in various stages of the renovation process.

“We’ve invested a tremendous amount of time, work and brain damage to do things right,” Hardy said during a mid-May interview.

Standing amid the bustle of workers on the ground floor of the hotel, which had the look of being far from the completed, he said: “We’re going to finish when we finish, and it’s going to cost what it’s going to cost.”

* * * * * *

Whether Mary Marshall took a similar approach when she had the original Marshall House built in 1851 is not known.

What is apparent from the newspaper articles of the day is that the Savannah was then – as it is now- in need of accommodations for visitors.

“ We have now good hotels and boarding houses, but not enough of them,” said The Daily Morning News of March 14, 1851, in reporting on the building of The Marshall House, “for their can be no doubt that many persons are deterred from visiting the city by the reports which have gone abroad (and truly too) that there were no rooms to be had.

“It is in view of this fact that the enterprising lady whose name the house bears is erecting a hotel in that part of Broughton Street beside Drayton and Abercorn, on the south side,” the newspaper stated, “This house will be a handsome pile, four stories high, 120 feet front, and 90 feet deep, giving ample room for large and commodious public and private parlors, dining room and chambers, sufficient for the accommodation of 135 lodgers.”

The fact that, in the mid-19th century, a woman would be providing Savannah with such a needed improvement was, according to historian Duncan, “exceptional but not unique.” Mary Marshall was one of several “steel magnolias” who has made contributions to the local scene as a businesswoman and civic leaders during Savannah’s long history, Duncan said.

“Women have always been – admittedly behind the scenes – movers and shakers” in the community, he said.

Mary Marshall was more visible than others however, because of her achievements in the realm of architecture. In addition to having the hotel built, she was responsible for Marshall Row, a group of four Greek revival town houses still standing at 230-244 E. Oglethorpe Ave. They were built by noted architect Charles Clusky for Mary Marshall in 1854, and Roulhac Toledano, author of The National Trust Guide to Savannah, calls them “among the most handsome in the city.”

In his book, Toledano includes Mary Marshall with three other “women named Mary” who “loom large in Savannah’s development architectural history.”

“One Creek-English woman named Mary Musgrove owned more real estate in mid-18th century Georgia than any one man or woman of the Trustee period,” states Toledano. “An Anglo-American Savannahian, Mary Marshall, was a bona fide mid-19th-century developer. Mary Telfair, the notable 19th-century benefactress of Savannah institutions, inherited wealth and position and used them to benefit her city. In the 1940’s, Mary Hillyer conceived and supervised restoration of the historic Trustees Garden area, thus spearheading restoration of the entire Old Fort area and the squares on the eastern side of the city.”

An observer of the Savannah scene in the 1850’s, James S, Silva, called Mary Marshall “ the wealthiest woman of the city” in his Recollections of an Old Savannahian. According to Duncan she inherited property valued at $35,000 and left an estate of from $250,000 to $300,000 when she dies in 1877 at the age of 93.

The property she inherited was amassed by her father, Gabriel Leaver, a well-to-do cabinetmaker who had a knack for accumulating land. Apparently, Mary Marshall also inherited her father’s business savvy; according to research by Nancy Slotin on file at the Georgia Historical Society, her wealth was “attributed to her own business dealings, not her inheritance.”

Chief among her assets was The Marshall House, whose 69 rooms were opened to lodgers in 1852. The Daily Morning News, followed a tour of the nearly completed hotel in October of the previous year, found there to be “nothing grand about this building” but allowed it had been “tastefully and happily designed and executed to make it a Family Hotel, an ornament in the city, and a honor to the energetic lady, who had given to it the prestige of her name.”

The ground floor, the front of which was granite, accommodated “three of the handsomest stories in Savannah,” the hotel office, a private entrance “for ladies,” the kitchen, wash rooms, bathrooms and “all the water operations.”

“On the second floor,” said the newspaper, ”at the east end of the house, is the gentlemen’s dining room, capable of seating 150 persons with comfort, and two small parlors for their use. On the same floor, at the west end, is the ladies’ dining room, of the same size as the other, and a handsome parlor, looking in Broughton street, with a small private parlor attached. These extremes are connected by a passageway on each side of which are sleeping rooms finished in equal to the parlors. The other two floors are devoted to the sleeping rooms.

“Every thing here seems to have been designed with a view to ensuring the comfort of the guests; the dining rooms being large and well ventilated, the parlors the same, and every bedroom in the house, from the largest family room to the smallest bachelor’s {sic} box, furnished with light and air, independently of all the rest of the house,”

The Daily Morning News also highlighted another feature of the hotel- a “nearly flat” roof “which will give the guests the advantage of a fine view of the city, and the surrounding country.”

No mention was made of the second floor veranda. But Thomas Gamble wrote about it in March 1929 in an article in the Savannah Morning News, saying it “extended along the front of the hotel covering the entire sidewalk…. On the piazza the guests could enjoy the street scene in comfort, and the old timers tell that it was a favorite lounging place where the guests and their visitors passed many hours.

* * * * * *

There is no observation deck atop this new Marshall House, but Hardy and his new partners have spent $250,000 to recreate the veranda, which will be accessible via the windows of the second floor guest rooms. The deck of the veranda will be outfitted with rockers and ceiling fans.

In another nod to the buildings past involving its exterior, workmen remove the stucco covering the original façade and windows.

The interior of the hotel is where history really is brought to life, however.

Four phases of Savannah’s past are celebrated via the display of artifacts and memorabilia and original and commissioned artwork.

The ground floor is devoted primarily to the history of the hotel. Behind the front desk in the lobby, which is painted yellow and white and features mahogany accents, resides an original oil portrait of Mary Marshall dating to 1837 and once owned by Jim Williams of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil notoriety. The hotel’s first owner gazes from the painting across the lobby and into the library at a rendering of her husband, John Marshall, which hangs above the mantel.

“They’ll be looking at one another,” said Hardy of this arrangement.

The library also contains a large painting of General James Edward Oglethorpe, the Englishman who founded Savannah in 1733.

The library opens into Chadwick’s the hotel’s two-room, 80 seat jazz bar and lounge. The rooms in which the walk around bar is located has a nautical theme featuring enlarged black and white photographs of tall ships and a huge painting of the SS Savannah, the fist steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The ceilings above the bar is painted so as to give the patrons the effect of gazing into a southern sky through tree branches festooned with Spanish moss.

The music area of Chadwick’s boasts displays saluting outstanding local jazz musicians and the Savannah Volunteer Guard, the militia organization for which John Marshall served as commander. The Guard display consists of a dress uniform, sword and other artifacts.

What might be the centerpiece of the ground floor is the courtyard venue of Café M, the hotel’s restaurant. Located in what is thought to be the outdoor carriage turnaround of the original Marshall House, this dining area is protected from the elements by a skylight that’s some 30 feet wide and 40 feet long. With its lush landscaping, brick and yellow-stucco walls, cast-iron furniture and gas lights, the area has the feel of gardens hidden behind many of the homes of Savannah’s Historic District. It’s also the site of a display kitchen where chefs can be seen cooking and of the hotel’s premier piece of commissioned artwork, a painting titled “The Meeting – Forty Acres and a Mule.”

The painting, which is about 5 feet long, and 4-and-a-half feet in height, depicts a meeting held during the Union occupation of Savannah in which African-American religious leaders told Federal military officers how they and their followers wanted to live after the end of slavery. The artwork is a result of Hardy’s discussions with local African-American historian and civil rights leader W.W. Law concerning how best to represent the area’s black history.

“W.W. has held my feet to the fire to make sure it’s perfect,” said Hardy of the painting.

The restaurant annex is the scene of more commissioned artwork – paintings by watercolorist Victor Richardson and by local artist Ken Herrington, who specializes in depicting Savannah’s African-American community.

Also on the ground floor is the hotel’s boardroom, whose walls are decorated with a wraparound panorama of the city’s riverfront as it appeared in the 1880’s.

The emphasis on local history carries throughout the upper floors of the hotel, whose hallways bear photographs, paintings and displays of artifacts and memorabilia – including bottles and keys found in the building during the renovation work. Each floor is devoted to a different period in the life of the city – the second spanning the time from Savannah’s founding to the Civil War; the third dealing with that momentous conflict; and the fourth embracing the years from the end of the war to the present.

The 68 guest rooms and suited on these floors are themselves filled with bits of history – the original and fireplaces, about 15 of the building’s footed bathtubs and much of the crowns molding.

Three decorated schemes have been use – yellow walls with white trim and natural pine beds; blue walls with white trim and pine beds painted white; and green cast walls with white trim and black cast-iron beds.

In recreating The Marshall House, Hardy ahs attempted to “return” the building back to the community by involving as many local resources as possible. He’s leaned for advice on folks such as Law and preservationist Lee Adler, who, among other things, introduced him to Kathy Ledvina, the historian for the project. He’s gratefully accepted contributions of memorabilia and photographs of people such as Hank Kennedy, who made available the Savannah Volunteer Guard paraphernalia and a pencil sketch of John Marshall that was used in creating his portrait, and he’s brought local artists and tradesmen into the project.“We’ve combined the concept of hospitality with entertainment and education,” said Hardy, who believes the hotel will provide lessons in history for its guests. “I don’t know of any other place like this.”