Historic Milton building that Elvis helped make famous is getting facelift and new tenant

In downtown Milton there stands a building that history tells us Elvis actually left.

The Exchange Hotel, built in 1914, served as a refuge for the King of Rock and Roll in late February of 1956, during the time he was performing at Pensacola's City Auditorium.

Ed Spears, the city's economic director, shared that somewhat spicy detail with the Milton City Council at a recent meeting while requesting a grant be provided to a Pensacola business looking to renovate the historic hotel and relocate its operations there.

"One of the somewhat joking criteria used in historic buildings is, 'Did Elvis sleep there?'" Spears told the council. "Elvis slept here."

Blackwood Financial Group, a commercial insurance and consulting agency, has announced plans to relocate from North Ninth Avenue in Pensacola to the 5185 Elmira St. building and has listed May 1 as its first day of business at the Exchange Hotel site.

City Council members voted April 9 to approve the $10,000 Business Improvement Program grant requested by Blackwood Financial Group managing partners Richard McCool and Besann Watson. The agency intends to match the city funding with $20,280 of its own and use the money to replace exterior doors and lighting, repair and repaint existing windows, obtain new signage and improve upon existing landscaping.

"I'm very excited for this," Spears told the council. "I've been hoping for an investment opportunity at this building since I've been here, for six years."

McCool told the council that Blackwood Financial has obtained a lease from building owner Jason Lasure with an option to buy.

"If we do acquire it we want to restore it to its 1914 facade so that it looks exactly like it did, including landscaping," McCool said.

He said the owner and his agency have already committed to an overhaul of the building interior.

"They and the building owner are investing almost $100,000 in (overall) renovations," Spears said in an email.

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Cassandra Sharp, president of the Santa Rosa Historical Society and a member of the city's Historic Preservation Board, called the business relocation and pending building renovation "a really big deal, and very exciting."

City Councilman Jeff Snow said of the renovation plans, "It's just really going to bring that building back to life."

A contributing member to the Milton Historic District, the Exchange Hotel building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987. It was designed by the same architect who envisioned Milton's iconic Imogene Theatre, along with the Santa Rosa County Grade School.

And it was not originally built to house visitors to the city.

In 1914, when the building went up near the prominent city intersection of Elmira Street and Caroline Street (U.S. Highway 90), it was supposed to serve as a telephone exchange office, according to Milton's Historic District Walking Tour guide.

"After its completion, the telephone exchange office relocated and the building was immediately re-purposed as a hotel," the guide said.

Its most famous guest had already caught the nation's attention in 1956 when he passed through Pensacola between stops in Jacksonville and Shreveport, Louisiana, and performed three shows, at 2, 5 and 8 p.m. on Feb. 26 at the City Auditorium.

His stay in Milton, Spears told the City Council, was an attempt to shield Elvis from "his rabid fans in Pensacola."

In August of that same year, "the King," or "Elvis the Pelvis" as some were disparagingly calling him by then, would do a much more widely reported 25-show tour through seven Florida cities that included Tampa/St. Petersburg, Orlando, Lakeland, Miami, Daytona Beach and Jacksonville.

This was after the release of the songs "Hound Dog" and "Don't Be Cruel" and one month before millions would tune in to see Presley perform on the Ed Sullivan Show, Dr. Ben Brotemarkle, the executive director of the Florida Historical Society, reported in a 2015 Florida Frontiers article that ran in Florida Today.

"Presley’s whirlwind 1956 tour of Florida was covered by national press, helping to further the singer’s fame," Brotemarkle wrote. "When asked why he was becoming so popular, Presley said, 'It’s all happened so fast. I don’t know what it is.'”

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Milton Exchange Hotel famed for Elvis Presley stay to be renovated