A $2 million renovation will begin soon on the Wells’Built Hotel, once the lone haven for Black travelers in segregation-era Orlando and now a museum where that history resonates.
In its heyday, from the 1920’s through the 1950’s, the 20-room, two-story brick hotel on South Street in Parramore rolled out welcomes to legendary Black musicians like Count Basie, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and BB King; and athletes like boxer Joe Louis and baseball star Jackie Robinson. All were forbidden by Jim Crow laws and the color of their skin from staying overnight at Florida hotels with white guests.
The musicians played the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” a network of small venues including Club Eaton in Eatonville and the South Street Casino in Orlando’s Parramore neighborhood where rising Black artists starred on stage. The circuit drew its name from a soul-food delicacy on the club menus.
Thurgood Marshall, a crusading civil rights lawyer who became the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, also stayed at Wells’Built in 1949 while he challenged guilty verdicts of young Black men falsely accused of raping Norma Padgett, a white 17-year-old housewife in Lake County. The notorious case of the “Groveland Four,” documented in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilbert King book “Devil in the Grove,” helped shape Marshall’s career and define for 70 years the image of Southern bigotry and racial injustice.
Exhibits at the Wells’Built Museum, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, chronicle Black history in Central Florida, with displays of important artifacts and memorabilia from the region. The Orlando museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope/Orlando Sentinel) Exhibits at the Wells’Built Museum, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, chronicle Black history in Central Florida, with displays of important artifacts and memorabilia from the region. The Orlando museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope/Orlando Sentinel) Wells’Built Museum in Orlando, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, displays of important artifacts and memorabilia related to Black history in Central Florida. The museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope/Orlando Sentinel) Exhibits at the Wells’Built Museum, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, chronicle Black history in Central Florida, with displays of important artifacts and memorabilia from the region. The Orlando museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope/Orlando Sentinel) Exhibits at the Wells’Built Museum, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, chronicle Black history in Central Florida, with displays of important artifacts and memorabilia from the region. The Orlando museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope/Orlando Sentinel) Exhibits at the Wells’Built Museum, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, chronicle Black history in Central Florida, with displays of important artifacts and memorabilia from the region. The Orlando museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope/Orlando Sentinel) Plaque on the exterior of the Wells’Built Museum in downtown Orlando, on Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel) Evidence from the Groveland Four case at the Wells’Built Museum in downtown Orlando, on Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel) Bessie Coleman exhibit at the Wells’Built Museum in downtown Orlando, on Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel) Zora Neale Hurston exhibit at the Wells’Built Museum in downtown Orlando, on Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel) The Wells’Built Museum in downtown Orlando, on Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel) Mary McLeod Bethune exhibit at the Wells’Built Museum in downtown Orlando, (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel) Show Caption1 of 13Exhibits at the Wells’Built Museum, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, chronicle Black history in Central Florida, with displays of important artifacts and memorabilia from the region. The Orlando museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope/Orlando Sentinel)Expand
“The Negro Travelers’ Green Book,” a register of hotels and restaurants that welcomed people of color in the racially hostile South, helped Marshall, then a lawyer for the NAACP, and his legal team find lodging in Central Florida at the “little hotel in Parramore.”
These priceless connections to history live on at today’s Wells’Built, where proprietor Elizabeth Thompson Grace is helping to fulfill her community’s story — and her family’s own narrative — by preserving and upgrading the hotel building, which anchors the Parramore Historic District, now located in the shadow of The KIA Center.
Grace, 48, president and CEO of the Central Florida Urban League, took the reins of the renovation project from her mother, Geraldine Thompson, the longtime Central Florida lawmaker, educator and civil rights champion who died unexpectedly in February.
Grace’s vision of the project is the same as her late mother’s.
Both noted the former hotel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
“I think it needs to be a place where we can celebrate the contributions of African Americans in our area so the names of those who paved the way for the rest of us in Orlando and Central Florida don’t get lost,” Grace said, reciting a long list of trail-blazers, including Dr. William Monroe Wells, who built the hotel, and Mabel Butler, 98, who died last month. “We want to be sure to bring all their stories forward.”
Wells moved from Georgia to Parramore in 1917 as a 28-year-old doctor and became both a healer and Black business leader in the community west of downtown Orlando. He privately financed and built both the hotel and the South Street Casino, which, contrary to its name, functioned as a social club and community center, not a gambling house. It hosted wedding receptions and other celebrations.
He put up his money because white-owned banks were unwilling to invest in his venture.
Wells was one of a few Black doctors in Orlando and, for a period during World War II, its only one.
He was credited with delivering 5,500 babies in his career before he died in 1957.
“The Wells’Built is one of those special places where history feels close enough to touch,” said Joy Wallace Dickinson, who wrote the “Florida Flashback” column for the Orlando Sentinel for nearly 25 years. “It reminds us how, even in the hard times of segregation, people built dignity and hospitality into the heart of their community.”
The former hotel closed after Wells died but has been a museum since 2001 when Grace’s mother reimagined its future.
She collected artifacts that told the story of Central Florida’s Black community, then built simple exhibits to display them. The renovation plan envisions improvements to those presentations, in hopes of drawing visitors and even tourists the cramped facility has so far struggled to engage.
Before her death, Geraldine Thompson harbored brief hopes of a grander center for the local Black community, as she pushed to locate a Florida Black History Museum in nearby Eatonville. With state leaders choosing to place that facility in St. Augustine instead, a rebuilt Wells’Built must play the role.
A stroll through its rooms shows the possibilities. One exhibit spotlights Mary Bethune Cookman, the educator, philanthropist, humanitarian and civil rights activist who started a private school for African-American students which later became Bethune-Cookman University. Dr. Wells was a pall-bearer at her funeral.
Another highlights daredevil aviatrix Bessie Coleman, who lived in Orlando in the 1920s and thrilled crowds with loop-de-loop aerobatics. Coleman was determined to soar over prejudice and traveled to Paris to learn to fly because U.S. flight schools would accept neither blacks nor women. Dubbed the “Queen of the Air,” she was the first African-American woman to earn a pilot’s license.
But not all artifacts depict triumphs. Authentic documents detail an 1860 auction of first-rate mules, hogs, wagons, carts — and 18 “valuable Negroes,” including Little Joe and Simon, trained blacksmiths, and Cupid, a sawyer, who was strong and skilled in cutting logs.
The funding pitch to Orange County that won $2 million in tourist tax funds for the museum cited its close proximity to Eatonville, one of the first self-governing all-Black municipalities in the nation. It predicted the Wells’Built would become a center for individuals interested in genealogy, storytelling and music that “provides the sound track for African American life…”
The plan is to create an experience with technology “to provide immersive storytelling and draw people into the African American journey.”
The facility also has more mundane needs that the money will meet — including HVAC work, flood mitigation, bathroom and elevator repairs, and handicapped-accessible entrances and pathways. Expansion of the overstuffed museum space could come through renovation efforts on Wells’ historic home, adjacent to the hotel and now sealed with plywood boards, which is also part of the eventual vision.
For Grace, the project carries deep meaning in the memories it offers of her mother, whose legacy she hopes to complete.
Without Geraldine Thompson, she said, the hotel almost certainly would have met the wrecking ball.
“This is her legacy, just the fact it still exists,” Grace said.
shudak@orlandosentinel.com