Excelsior House Hotel

06/01/2026

Free and fun! We will have lots of free activities for the Fourth!

05/26/2026

Jay Gould was one of the most powerful men in America. He controlled railroads, he controlled markets, and he was not a man you said no to. But Jefferson, Texas said no anyway. In the 1870s Gould came to Jefferson with an offer — let me run my Texas and Pacific Railroad through your town. Jefferson was riding high as the second busiest port in Texas, steamboats coming and going, cotton moving, money flowing. They didn’t need him. They turned him down. Gould was furious. Before he left he walked into the Excelsior House Hotel — the finest hotel in East Texas — and wrote in the guest register. “Grass will grow in your streets.” Then he took his railroad to a scrappy little town to the west nobody thought much of. That town was Dallas. Jefferson’s steamboat era ended not long after. The port dried up. The population left. Gould’s curse seemed to come true. But here’s what nobody tells you. Decades later the ladies of the Jefferson Garden Club tracked down Jay Gould’s personal luxury railroad car — the Atalanta — sitting abandoned in a field. They hauled it back to Jefferson on a truck, restored every inch of it, and put it on display right across the street from the hotel where he wrote his curse. Jay Gould tried to erase Jefferson, Texas. Jefferson turned his prized possession into a tourist attraction. Some towns don’t forget. And some towns don’t lose.

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.

05/24/2026

05/23/2026

05/19/2026

On behalf of the Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club, President Stacy Mills was honored to present two $1,000 scholarships at the Jefferson High School Awards Ceremony.

Congratulations to Payten Kimble and Maia Cooper. We wish them continued success in their academic pursuits and are confident they will continue to make Jefferson proud.

05/18/2026