Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the Mayor's Mansion Inn was created and built in the years after the scourge of the Civil War. This beautiful mansion, now a Bed & Breakfast Inn, is located in the historic Fort Wood district next to downtown Chattanooga. The Fort Wood District was originally named for a Civil War redoubt. All but three of the Civil War fortifications in the immediate Chattanooga area were leveled by 1880; Fort Wood was one of the remaining three. Starting in the late 1880's, development came to the area; Fort Wood took its first steps to becoming one of the most exclusive residential areas in Chattanooga.

In recent years the city's Victorian architecture has succumbed to more modern architectural elements. Fort Wood is, however, one of the few areas that escaped this modernism and to this day remains as one of the city's best collections of Victorian homes. Among the different styles of homes in the neighborhood, the Mayor's Mansion Inn is the only house clearly Victorian Romanesque. The stone surface, arches, decorative tiles, and stone trim make this building very distinctive in the district and in the city.

Edmond Watkins built his home which has become the Mayor's Mansion Inn in 1889. He moved to Chattanooga in the late 1880's from Mississippi where he had been a state legislator. Only one of a group of notable Mississippians who came to Chattanooga in the later part of the 1880's, he was president of the East End Land Company and the Chattanooga and Lookout Mountain Railway Company. Watkins was also involved in land speculation on Lookout Mountain. In 1892 a local paper wrote, "The development of the mountain is due largely to Watkins energy, activity and enterprise." Perhaps his most crowning achievement was the two-year term he served as Mayor of Chattanooga from 1897 to 1899.