When downtown businessman Frank Pendergast opens his proposed 17-room boutique hotel with adjoining restaurant and banquet facility, it will not represent a new era for the state’s Antebellum Capital, but a return to form for a business district once flush with lodging for the city’s transient population.

When Milledgeville served as the state’s capital, many business people made their living catering to the needs of state dignitaries who called the city home for only months at a time.

In his book “Milledgeville: Georgia’s Antebellum Capital,” late local historian James C. Bonner wrote at length about the capital’s many taverns — as they were called at the time — and the personalities who ran them.

“Tavern-keeping was a popular if not a lucrative business in early Milledgeville, particularly in November and December, when legislative sessions brought several hundred visitors to town,” Bonner wrote.

During the capital days the taverns provided more than just a place to stay, taverns provided travelers with food and drink as well as entertainment.

“Thomas G. Collier advertised that he had taken a house — recently erected by Captain Jett Thomas and fronting the capitol square — which he offered for public entertainment, promising to furnish the house with handsome furniture from New York; he also promised choice liquors,” Bonner wrote. “Moreover, a dancing academy would be held in his assembly rooms on Fridays and Saturdays.”

Georgia College & State University History Department Chair Bob Wilson said that the taverns of the Antebellum period where everything to everyone. No matter the traveler’s tastes, there was sure to be a tavern that met their needs.

Wilson said at one time there was a tavern that stood roughly where the Golden Pantry is at the corner of Hancock and Jefferson streets that was called the Temperance House.

The point was, if you don’t like to drink or you have a sober temperament, this was the tavern for you, Wilson said.

“All the people would try to get their little niche, and that was what the Temperance House was all about,” he said.

But the presence of alcoholic spirits was not the sole factor by which early travelers to Milledgeville chose their accommodations, many of the early taverns proudly displayed their political leanings as well.

Possibly the last remaining structure from the Antebellum period that was used as a tavern is the Brown Stetson Sanford House, which now resides on West Hancock Street, several blocks from its original location near the Baldwin County Courthouse on Wilkinson Street. It was not uncommon for the house to be referred to as the Whig Party Headquarters, and at several passes was as brazen as to be dubbed The State’s Rights Hotel and the Anti-Van Buren Hotel, Wilson said.

It seems that it was the fashion of the time for tavern owners and their guests to wear their heart on their sleeves.

But as the state capital moved to Atlanta, so did all the guests who made Milledgeville’s colorful tavern culture possible. In the years following the transition, many of the structures that once provided room, board, drink and discussion to the transient legislators changed uses and ceased to exist.

“A lot I suspect were pulled down or burned down,” Wilson said. “One way or another they bit the dust.”