text: Site The first structures to be built at 1401 Pennsylvania Avenue NW were six small houses constructed by Colonel John Tayloe III, of The Octagon House, DC, and Mount Airy, Virginia, in 1816. Tayloe leased the six buildings to Joshua Tennison, who named them Tennison's Hotel. The structures served as a hotel for the next three decades, the leaseholder and name changing several times: Williamson's Mansion Hotel, Fullers American House, and the City Hotel. By 1847, the structures were in disrepair and Tayloe's son, Benjamin Ogle Tayloe (of the Benjamin Ogle Tayloe House), was desperate to find a tenant who would maintain the structures and run them profitably.
  Willard's Hotel
  The current hotel was founded by Henry Willard, a former chief steward on the steamer "Niagara" on the Hudson River, personally suggested by “Ogle” Tayloe's second wife, Miss Phoebe Warren, formerly of Troy, New York, in 1847; when he leased the six buildings, combined them into a single structure, and enlarged it into a four-story hotel he renamed Willard's Hotel. Willard purchased the hotel property from Ogle Tayloe in 1864, but a dispute over the purchase price and the form of payment (paper currency or gold coin) led to a major equity lawsuit that ended up in the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court split the difference in Willard v. Tayloe. 75 U.S. 557 (1869): The purchase price would remain the same, but Willard must pay in gold coin (which had not depreciated in value the way paper currency had).