At the southeast corner of Second and Market Streets on Market Square stood the Jones House, a mid-Nineteenth Century hotel built in 1853 that was later known as the Leland Hotel, enlarged in the same architectural style, and renamed the Commonwealth Hotel before a major fire in 1921 led to its total redesign as office space in the Dauphin Building, which was demolished in 1990 for the bank headquarters now called the Allfirst Tower. Abraham Lincoln stopped here on February 22, 1861, while traveling to his inauguration in Washington DC, greeted and spoke to city residents in the Square, and rode by carriage to the State Capitol Building to address the Pennsylvania Legislature as the guest of Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin, but a threat of assassination forced his early morning departure from a more obscure train station outside the city instead of an overnight stay. Earlier, in October of 1794, George Washington stayed on this site in an earlier log building while traveling to western Pennsylvania to suppress the Whiskey Insurrection, and that log house was later renamed Washington Inn in honor of his visit.
