The Piedmont Hotel was built here just before the nearby railroad opened in 1873. Primarily a summer resort, it was a rambling, U-shaped, three-story hotel with 30 rooms, joined by a large dining room and kitchen. After the Civil War, Confederate James Longstreet owned and operated the hotel for almost 20 years, and during that time, as Georgia’s most influential Republican Party leader, he hosted notable 19th century Americans including Union General and New York Congressman Daniel Sickles, Confederate General Joseph Johnston, newspaperman Henry Grady, and writer Joel Chandler Harris. Its most famous guests were the young Woodrow and Ellen Axson Wilson, and their second daughter, Jessie Woodrow, was born there on August 28, 1887, in a room that still exists. The need to meet the hotel’s demand for its famous fried chicken and other savory chicken dishes is recognized as the motivation for the beginning of the poultry industry in Northeast Georgia. Most of the hotel building was demolished circa 1918, but in 1993 a run-down duplex apartment building was identified as the hotel’s lower-level west wing, containing the room where Jessie Wilson was born.