Marshall House Savannah

When Mary Marshall opened her hotel on Broughton Street in 1851, Savannah was a busy port whose visitors needed rooms close to the riverfront and the city’s commercial streets. The hotel bears her name, a reminder that one of Savannah’s best-known historic buildings began as a business built by a woman in the years before the Civil War.

War changed the building’s use. During the Union occupation of Savannah in 1864–65, the Marshall House was taken over by federal forces and used as a hospital. The hotel’s own history also describes earlier service as a hospital during yellow-fever outbreaks. Those uses have become inseparable from the building’s reputation, but popular accounts often supply more detail than the surviving evidence can securely confirm.