Word: willards
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Abraham Lincoln sneaked into the Willard one dawn just a year later, his bodyguards having cloaked his movements from Illinois because of rumors of assassination. When the President-elect took his boots off in his second-story suite, he found he had forgotten his slippers. Henry Willard had some, but they were not big enough for Abe. Willard's grandfather, William Bradley, just then visiting, had huge feet and slippers to fit. He sent them over to Lincoln's rooms...
Julia Ward Howe heard marching, singing soldiers beneath her Willard window and wrote the words for The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Walt Whitman aimed a sharp arrow at what he saw in the Willard...
Speak, blow, put on airs in Willard's sumptuous bar, or anywhere...
...London Times's famed war correspondent William Howard Russell marveled at the hostelry. "The great pile of Willard's Hotel probably maintains more scheming, plotting, planning heads, more aching and joyful hearts, than any building of the same size ever held in the world...
Ulysses Grant and his son checked into the Willard in 1864, and the clerk, so used to the high and mighty, did not recognize the man who commanded nearly a million troops. As President, Grant would often wander out of the loneliness of the White House and come to the Willard, which offered him a leather chair in a secluded place in the lobby where he could watch the passing show. Even then he was pestered by people with petitions and pleas. He called these intruders "lobbyists," and the term stuck...