Marietta in History
The Whitlock House
1870s and 1880s
After the Civil War, Marietta again became known as a resort for both summer and winter visitors. One expressed his love of Marietta by saying that he was a traveler to many cities, towns and villages, but he had never been in any place more congenial to his taste than Marietta. "There are two characteristics of which I would take special notice," he wrote in the Marietta Journal on April 9, 1869. "The salubrity of the atmosphere and the sociability of the citizens. The first cannot be surpassed, the latter (in my opinion) is unparalleled…"
Visitors overflowed the Kennesaw House and rented rooms in private residences. Large boarding houses were built to accommodate the large numbers of visitors, and one of the most popular was the Whitlock House. Milledge G. Whitlock built the 150-room hostelry that occupied almost the entire block of Whitlock Avenue where the Whitlock Inn now stands. He was a popular host and the Whitlock House was at the center of Marietta's social life.
Adults enjoyed diversions such as soap-bubble and bean-bag parties, fancy dress balls, amateur theatricals and especially Marietta's first Mikado party, for which the house was festooned with Japanese decorations. The Whitlock House was destroyed by fire in April 1889 and Marietta's resort life was never to be the same again.
Temple, Sarah Blackwell Gober. The First Hundred Years.
History of the Whitlock Inn. www.whitlockinn.com.