The antique dining room table was set with silver, crystal, and the innkeeper's best presidential Lenox. Candles flickered as we sipped coffee. This was breakfast Jefferson-style, in the perfectly restored Governor's House Bed & Breakfast. "A friend will be joining us," innkeeper Llawanda Golden had informed me when I emerged from my room that morning. As a visiting food journalist in town to judge the "Taste of Jefferson" contest later that day, I'd expected a sales pitch at some point during the weekend. And Jimmie Ruth Ford was it.

Stylishly dressed and coiffed, she bustled through the front door just as we sat down to the elegant meal. This small-town society matron with a gift for gab pulled up a chair and between bites of syrup-soaked French toast, began regaling me with stories of her hometown. Imagine a well-dressed version of Auntie Mame with an East Texas twang and tasteful jewelry and you've got her. The proprietor of a bed-and-breakfast reservations service, she described Jefferson's various home tours and the wide selection of meticulously restored historic properties around town. But what was riveting was Jimmie Ruth's account of the town's most notorious murder: Abe Rothschild, the black sheep of a wealthy Cincinnati family, married his pregnant young paramour, the bejeweled Bessie Moore, and brought her to Jefferson under an assumed name. When the couple quarreled while picnicking one afternoon, Rothschild supposedly shot his wife and took the last of her diamond jewelry to finance his gambling habit. The murder resulted in several trials over a period of seven years and though popularly believed to be guilty, Rothschild was never convicted. Surprisingly, the annual re-enactment of the trial is one of Jefferson's most beloved civic functions.

The sponsors of this event and many others, are a savvy bunch of hardworking Jefferson society dames who have mined the town's rich, colorful past to create a variety of successful business ventures. Jimmie Ruth Ford, Llawanda Golden and the sixty years of Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club members who came before them, have restored Jefferson's former economic prosperity by embracing the town's history -- mansions, murders, millionaires and all.

JEFFERSON'S PAST : : WHERE TO STAY : : DINING/ENTERTAINMENT
OUTDOOR/CADDO LAKE : : NEARBY JEFFERSON : : LINKS/LISTINGS