DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Excelsior House in Marion County. Now, if you're drivin' through Jefferson, Texas, and you happen to slow down long enough to look at a building and think — that place has seen some things — well, friend, you have no idea. The Excelsior House is the oldest hotel in East Texas.
Let that settle for a moment. The oldest. The frame portion of this place went up in the eighteen-fifties, and then in 1864, somebody decided to add a brick wing, because apparently one historic building wasn't enough.
By the time that brick was set, the Civil War was still burning. That's the kind of timeline we're talkin' about here. Now, Jefferson in those days was a river port town — boats comin' and goin', commerce flowin', the whole grand spectacle of a city that believed itself to be the center of the universe, and honestly, it had a case to make.
And when a town is that kind of place, the hotel fills up with a certain caliber of guest. We are talking Presidents. Ulysses S.
Grant walked through those doors. Rutherford B. Hayes walked through those doors.
Two Presidents of the United States, sleeping under that roof, during what the marker calls the river port days of Jefferson. But here's where it gets genuinely interesting, because right alongside those two commanders-in-chief on the guest registry sits one Oscar Wilde — poet, wit, a man who could make a room feel simultaneously underdressed and overdramatized just by entering it. Grant, Hayes, and Oscar Wilde.
You could not write a stranger guest list if you tried. Now, time has a way of testing old things. The Excelsior House needed some tending to, and between 1961 and 1963, the Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club stepped up and restored her.
That's the kind of commitment that keeps a hundred-year-old building standin' for the next hundred years. The Excelsior House endures — oldest hotel in East Texas, and arguably the most interesting front porch you'll never be invited to sit on.
What the marker says
Oldest hotel in East Texas. Frame part built in 1850s; brick wing added 1864. Among famous guests during river port days of Jefferson were Presidents Grant and Hayes, and poet Oscar Wilde. Restored 1961-63 by Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1966