Former Charleston mayor T.T. Hyde formed the Marion Square Realty Co. in 1920 and hired New York architect William Lee Stoddart to design a 12-story Beaux-Arts hotel across from Marion Square, at a moment when the city was in the middle of the Charleston Renaissance, a wave of artistic and literary attention that included DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy, later reworked into the Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess. The hotel opened February 7, 1924, at a cost of $1.5 million, becoming the tallest and grandest hotel in the Carolinas, and took its name from Revolutionary War guerrilla leader Francis Marion, known as the Swamp Fox for his ability to vanish into the lowcountry marshes.
Black laborers built the hotel but were barred from staying there under segregation, and by the 1960s it had become a site of civil rights demonstrations that eventually pressured Charleston’s merchants to drop their segregated policies. The hotel became the city’s first fully air-conditioned building in 1952 and underwent a major restoration in 1996 that earned a National Trust Award.