Exchange Hotel, Montgomery

The hotel was a hotbed of politics; during the American Civil War 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.

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), with architect Samuel Holt, on the corner of Montgomery and Commerce Streets.

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.

"[7] During the American Civil War, when Montgomery (briefly) was the capital of the Confederacy, president Jefferson Davis had his headquarters (and his living accommodations) at the Exchange.

[12] He stopped there again in April 1886,[13] 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.

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 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.