“Mr. Hodgson is very English in his tastes and habits. He thinks me, I believe, a perfect outlaw from the Court of Fashion—a very plebeian in my notions…There is much in him to like and I hope that he will give up diplomacy and become a useful private character.” 

    —Mary Telfair 

The Georgia Historical Society  

The Georgia Historical Society was founded here in Savannah in 1839 and has been responsible for collecting and organizing the artifacts of Georgia’s history ever since. 

This beautiful building was named for William Brown Hodgson, the curator of the organization for twenty-five years. In 1842, Hodgson possessed the good sense to marry Margaret Telfair, the youngest daughter of Edward Telfair, a wealthy merchant-planter and three-term governor of Georgia.  

As a result, for two decades the couple became a centerpiece of the cultural, political, and intellectual life of Savannahian society.  In 1871, William Brown Hodgson died and was buried in the Telfair Family crypt in Bonaventure Cemetery. Soon after, this building was built, named, and gifted to the Georgia Historical Society as a memorial to Hodgson by his wife, Margaret, and her older sister, Mary Telfair. 

In fact, after her sister’s sudden death in 1874, it was Mary Telfair who carried out Margaret’s intentions by funding the completion of the building. In the transfer of deed-of-property to the Georgia Historical Society, Mary Telfair ordered the portrait of Hodgson be inscribed as: “In Memoriam, William Brown Hodgson; this building is erected by Margaret Telfair Hodgson, A.D., 1873.” 

Mr. Hodgson never received a formal college education. But as a young man, he had a unique and innate affinity for learning languages. That skill gained him the attention of Henry Clay. And when Clay later became U.S. Secretary of State under President John Quincy Adams, Hodgson was soon busy serving in diplomatic missions to Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, England, and South America. 

Hodgson met Margaret Telfair in Paris while on his way to Northern Africa. They would later marry in London, England. Over his lifetime, Hodgson mastered 13-languages; and in 1832, he served as the official interpreter, or dragoman, in Constantinople, Turkey, for various diplomatic affairs. 

Following Margaret Telfair’s death and the transfer of this property to the Georgia Historical Society, Mary Telfair died in June 1875, the day after she signed her final will. Her extensive estate, then valued at more than $640,000, would translate into well over $15 million today. 

With so much money at stake, it’s not surprising that Miss Telfair’s heirs contested her will in court. The legal battle over her bequests would last eight years, and the case eventually would wind up being heard before the Supreme Court of the United States. Biographer Charles J. Johnson’s Mary Telfair: The Life and Legacy of a Nineteenth-Century Woman provides a fabulously detailed telling of her story. 

The primary issue was that Mary Telfair bequeathed the bulk of her estate to charities — just like the gifting to the Georgia Historical Society of the William Brown Hodgson building. In late-1882, Justice Gray of the Supreme Court ruled, “...all the devices and bequests in Mary Telfair’s will were valid.” As a result, the Telfair name would be on hospitals and museums, prompting the Savannah Morning News to proclaim: “No one since Oglethorpe has done more for the people of Savannah as this one woman.”