05/26/2026
There is a hotel in Jefferson, Texas that has been open since 1858. Not restored and reopened. Not rebuilt and renamed. Open. Continuously. Since before the Civil War. The Excelsior House Hotel was built by a steamboat captain named William Perry on land the city of Jefferson gave him in 1846 — back when Jefferson was the beating commercial heart of all of Northeast Texas and paddle boats from New Orleans were docking outside his front door every single day. In its golden years the Excelsior was the finest address in all of East Texas. President Ulysses S. Grant slept there. President Rutherford B. Hayes slept there. President Lyndon B. Johnson slept there. Oscar Wilde checked in when he came to Jefferson to recite poetry at the opera house — and apparently spent a good portion of his visit explaining his lavender velvet jacket to the other guests. Lady Bird Johnson came back as First Lady to the same hotel where she had spent time as a Jefferson schoolgirl. Jay Gould signed the guest register in 1882 and wrote “The End of Jefferson” beneath his name. The hotel outlasted him by over a century. When Jefferson’s economy collapsed after 1873 and the steamboats stopped coming, the Excelsior kept its doors open anyway. And in 1961, the Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club — the same women who would later bring Diamond Bessie’s story back to life every spring — took ownership of the hotel and restored it completely. They still run it today as a nonprofit. The original registration desk is still in the lobby. The walnut secretary. The Empire sofa. The ballroom with its New Orleans influence still intact. You can book a room tonight in the oldest hotel in the state of Texas and sleep in the same building where presidents and poets and robber barons once laid their heads. In Jefferson, Texas — history is not behind glass. You can still check in.
