The Hotel That Became a Courthouse: Ellijay's Lost Landmark on the Square

For most of the 20th century, justice in Gilmer County was handed down inside a building that started life as a hotel. The story of the old courthouse on the Ellijay square — how it rose, what it became, and how it came down — is the story of the town’s heart.

A hotel on the square

The handsome two-story brick building was raised on the downtown Ellijay square in 1898 as the Hyatt Hotel (no relation to the modern hotel chain), in the Classical Revival style. It is often said to be the only county courthouse in Georgia that was not originally built to be a courthouse — a distinction Ellijay residents have long taken pride in.

From guests to gavel

Gilmer County had made do with earlier courthouses — a wooden one from the 1830s and a masonry one built in 1854 that served for some eight decades. In 1934, the county bought the former Hyatt Hotel and converted it into the courthouse, and there it stayed for the next 69 years, the unmistakable anchor of the square.

What stands today

A new courthouse complex was completed in 2009. Rather than break entirely with the past, its designers gave it a familiar face: the north section was built to replicate the old 1898 courthouse, so the square still wears a version of the building generations of residents grew up with. Nearby, the Tabor House Museum on Spring Street — believed to be the oldest surviving house in Ellijay — was leased to the Gilmer County Historical Society in 2008 and now keeps the area’s history close at hand.

Timeline

Cover photo: the current Gilmer County Courthouse (the 2009 replica), by Nyttend via Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Sources include Wikipedia, the National Register of Historic Places, the New Georgia Encyclopedia, and American Courthouses.