Historic New Perry Hotel may have been torn down, but see its legacy at this museum

Inside a 1927 home transformed into a museum, a carefully arranged space creates a living history of the New Perry Hotel that was demolished earlier this summer.

The exhibit at the Perry Area Historical Museum includes all sorts of treasures, including hotel keys and glass door knobs, an ice bucket, a decorative pillow and chair, a white baker/chef jacket with the initials “NPH” and a hotel uniform displayed on a mannequin.

The New Perry Hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.

But the historical significance of the hotel wasn’t enough to save the 99-year-old structure. By 2024, the same year of the city’s bicentennial, the building had severely deteriorated and was deemed by the property owner and the city as beyond saving.

In the hotel’s place, a three-floor development has been proposed to include ground-floor retail space, second-floor office suites and third-floor penthouse apartments. New retail buildings on the site also are proposed.

Living history

Much of what is featured in the museum exhibit is from the era the New Perry Hotel was under the ownership of Yates and Nannette Green, said Ellie Loudermilk, museum director and president of the Perry Area Historical Society.

The Greens, who spent one night of their honeymoon in the hotel in 1937, purchased the three-story hotel in 1944.

Their portraits hang in the exhibit, which also includes a 1944-1994 banner that celebrates the 50th anniversary of hotel ownership by the Greens.

Nannette Green is credited with adding elegance to the dining room with cloth tablecloths and fresh-cut flowers on every table. She was described by Loudermilk as “a lovely lady.”

“She was the hostess,” said Loudermilk, who recalled enjoying lemon chess pie and coffee with a group from church at the New Perry Hotel. “She was the hospitality of Perry, Georgia.”

Green commissioned Atlanta artist Louise Turner to paint eight camellia paintings, which hung above the buffet in the dining room. One of the paintings now hangs in exhibit. Turner, along with other members of the Atlanta Arts Association, was killed in a plane crash upon takeoff at Orly Airport in Paris on June 3, 1962.

“That dining room was the social center at the time,” said Loudermilk, who formerly taught business education and would take her high school students to dine at the hotel to teach social etiquette.

The exhibit includes three menus, including one dated May 13, 1964, when the Greens owned the hotel. Starting with soup, the 1964 menu offered a full-course meal that included, hors d’oeuvres, a salad, more than a dozen entree choices, vegetables and multiple dessert options.

A diner might have chosen to start with cream of asparagus soup, nibble on rosebud radishes and cucumber pickles, order a tossed green salad with French dressing and a boiled stuffed flounder with eggplant casserole and sweet potato souffle and then finish off the meal with Southern pecan pie with whipped cream.

The cost for that meal would have been $1.65, according to the menu.

The exhibit also features a table setting the way it would have looked in the hotel dining room with a coffee cup, silverware, a folded napkin, and plating for the meal from hors d’oeuvres to condiments, according to Loudermilk.

“That’s the value of having this exhibit in this museum is to be able to tell the story; for people to remember that there were people like, you know, the Greens, who, you know, their story lives on,” Loudermilk said. “They gave their all to hospitality in Perry, Georgia, and they put Perry, Georgia on the map for 50 years.

“You know, people drove from everywhere to come eat at this restaurant. That’s a legacy, you know, and I love the idea that, you know, we can continue the legacy,” she said.

Here are a few of the other gems in the New Perry Hotel exhibit:

• An assortment of postcards with photos of the hotel over the years, including one from when the hotel first opened in 1925. Another shows the New Perry Motel that was built behind the hotel in 1955. The Greens also added a pool and cabana.
• A framed picture of the hotel that hung in the Washington office of the late U.S. Rep. Richard Ray, a Democrat and former Perry mayor, who served in Congress from 1983-1993.
• A black rotary dial telephone from Room 104 of the New Perry Hotel with the hotel’s number showing of 987-1000. The telephone is in a separate exhibit of the hotel with other telephones of the past.
• A framed picture from the turn of the century of the Perry Hotel, formerly the Cox Inn. The black and white photo shows a two-story structure with a front veranda. Meals were served family-style on a long table. After the New Perry Hotel was built on the site, the Perry Hotel was demolished.
• “Recipes from the New Perry Hotel,” a compilation of memories and favorite recipes of Nannette Green in her 50th year at the hotel. Written by Bobby Nelson in conjunction with Green, the book was published by the New Perry Hotel in 1994 and included in the museum because it is out of print. The Houston County Public Library system has a copy.

About the museum

The museum was established in 2010 in a residential home that Dr. Horace Evans built two years after the New Perry Hotel was constructed. Family members continued to live in the house over the years until 1990 when the property was sold to the city of Perry for commercial use. The historical society leases the property from the city.

Everything in the museum was donated, according to Loudermilk.

“The thing that, I guess, strikes me the deepest is that this is a town that loves itself and its history ... The town was generous, and they gave. That gets me right here,” said Loudermilk, placing her hand over her heart.

Loudermilk and her late husband, Bill Loudermilk, who was also her high school sweetheart, put together over time the New Perry Hotel exhibit and other collections that make up the museum. A member of the historical society, he would help her when he was off from work.

“I can’t tell you the evenings and the Saturdays and the Sunday afternoons that we put in, you know, down here, trying to get, you know, to get it set up the way we wanted it set up,” Ellie Loudermilk said. “And it was his idea to theme it.”

Themed domestic history, a room in the museum includes clothes local people wore, toys that children played with and jewelry and hats that were worn.

A West Point uniform from Perry’s own General Courtney Hodges, commander of the First Army during World War II, is kept in a display case in this room.

Another display in the room pays tribute to all the Miss Georgia winners from Houston County, including Miss America 2016 Betty Cantrell.

Each area of the museum tells a story. Here are a few more highlights:

• A 1927 kitchen — The kitchen includes the original 1927 sink and cabinetry as well as a 1933 refrigerator. “We’ve got different eras,” Loudermilk said. “But it all speaks to the lifestyle of that period of time.”
• A man cave — Created to be of interest for the museum’s “gentlemen visitors,” this area includes a “traffic frog” that predates the red light, a train stake that signaled a train engineer not to blow the whistle and all kinds of tools, she said.
• Arrowheads — A wall display of arrowheads that came from Perry’s Evergreen Cemetery, the oldest public cemetery in Houston County. A Creek Indian village once existed where the cemetery is now located, Loudermilk said.
• The reception room — Another area is filled with memorabilia that’s mostly from Perry, including the museum’s “most prized possession” of an 1821 lottery deed. Before Perry incorporated on Dec. 9, 1824, there was small community known as Wattsville from 1821 to 1824, according to Loudermilk. About 20 families lived in Wattsville with the Indians, she said.
• A hallway showcases artists and authors — “We actually have one piece of music that was published in Perry, Georgia,” she said. “Oh! It’s Good to be in Georgia” was written and composed by Evelyn Hunt of Perry in 1947.
• Community history — This room features all sorts of artifacts from churches, businesses, schools and people. “It just blesses me when I come across things that people have treasured, and this one is a treasure,” said Loudermilk as she held up a boy’s outfit. “Look at the pristine condition of his outfit. That tells you that mother’s heart, she kept this for all these years.”
• Heritage —This room is home to files upon files of historical research, all of which are digitized.
• A military room — This room showcases the military, with artifacts from the Civil War, World War I and World War II. The room also includes other historical data such as when farmers from Houston County and other counties met up in Perry to join the second tractorcade in 1979 to the nation’s capitol to protest the 1977 Farm Bill.

Loudermilk has received many awards and accolades for her work to preserve the area’s history. She considers the 2022 Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities that honors the museum as the most significant. She also personally earned the 2009 Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities for her work and research for her book, “A Ramble Through Olde Perry.”

March 15 will mark 15 years for the museum.

The museum at 901 Northside Drive in Perry is open from 10 a.m. to noon and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Other days and times are by appointment. The number is 478-224-4442.

This story was originally published September 17, 2024 at 5:00 AM.