Gottfried Leonard Norrman arrived in Atlanta from Sweden and built a career designing buildings across Georgia. For the Windsor, he blended Queen Anne exuberance with Romanesque weight, creating a five-story structure crowned with towers, balconies, and a Flemish stepped roof. The centerpiece was a three-story open atrium lobby, a soaring interior space that made visitors look up before they even reached the front desk. One hundred guest rooms filled the upper floors. The building at 125 West Lamar Street announced that Americus, a modest county seat in Sumter County, considered itself worthy of grandeur. Norrman himself described his design as being 'of a more fanciful character,' and the finished hotel delivered on that promise, its ornate facade unlike anything else in southwest Georgia.

The timing could not have been worse. The Windsor opened into a national financial panic that crushed the tourist trade on which the hotel depended. By the end of the decade, it had declared bankruptcy. Yet the building endured, passing through various owners and finding new purposes over the following decades. The hotel's guest book accumulated remarkable names. In 1917, Vice President Thomas R. Marshall gave a speech from the Windsor's balcony. In 1928, Franklin D. Roosevelt, then campaigning for the New York governorship, addressed the local Chamber of Commerce from the same perch. But economic pressures proved relentless, and in the early 1970s, after nearly eighty years of operation, the Windsor closed its doors. The building sat empty, its atrium gathering dust, its towers silhouetted against the Georgia sky like a monument to faded ambition.

The Windsor's resurrection began with the recognition that the building was too remarkable to lose. A restoration effort eventually brought in 5.8 million dollars to return the historic structure to its original character. The hotel reopened with 53 guest rooms, fewer than the original hundred but each reflecting the Victorian detail Norrman had intended. Former President Jimmy Carter, born in nearby Plains, Georgia, just ten miles to the west, became a vocal supporter of the revived hotel. Today the Windsor features a Carter Presidential Suite named in his honor, alongside a Bridal Suite in one of the building's towers. The hotel stands as a contributing property within the Americus Historic District, which has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1976.

Americus itself has weathered cycles of prosperity and hardship that mirror the Windsor's story. The town's historic district preserves a concentration of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commercial architecture that rewards slow exploration. The Windsor anchors this district not just architecturally but symbolically, proof that a community's most ambitious dreams can survive even when economics and time conspire against them. The hotel's towers remain visible above the surrounding roofline, a landmark from the street and from the air, its Flemish stepped roof and Queen Anne silhouette unmistakable against the flat Sumter County landscape. Guests still sleep in rooms where the walls remember a vice president's oratory and a future president's ambition.