Maxwell House

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Maxwell House factory located in Houston, Texas

Maxwell House is a brand of coffee. It was named in honor of the Maxwell House hotel, a famous hotel in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, which burned to the ground on December 25, 1961. The coffee served there was blended by a local grocer named Joel Cheek. Supposedly, when Theodore Roosevelt visited Nashville while he was President, he drank a cup of it and proclaimed it "Good to the last drop", which is still a registered trademark for the product. (From the proceeds of the sale of Cheek-Neal Coffee, the original parent company of the Maxwell House brand, to General Foods Corporation, Cheek built a large mansion, Cheekwood, on the outskirts of Nashville, which was later donated to the state of Tennessee and now serves as a botanical garden and art gallery.) Historian Lerone Bennett, Jr. writes in his book, Before the Mayflower (Chicago:Johnson Publishing Co, 2003), that the original hotel was also the site of the first national meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. The meeting took place in April of 1867, and was held in Room 10 of the hotel. An earlier Maxwell House on the same site was the site of the Southern Convention of 1850, where Southern secession was seriously discussed at length for the first time.

The modern "Maxwell House Hotel", several miles from the downtown site of the original in the "MetroCenter" development, was built in the 1970s and uses the name under license from Kraft Foods.