Hodgson Hall is the third home of the Georgia Historical Society, which was established in 1839 and is the tenth-oldest such institution in the nation (after those of Massachusetts, 1791; New York, 1804; Maine, 1822; New Hampshire, 1823; Pennsylvania, 1824; Connecticut, 1825; Virginia, 1831; Kentucky, 1836; and Vermont, 1838). Margaret Telfair Hodgson commissioned the building in 1873 to honor her recently deceased husband, William Brown Hodgson, a leading scholar of ancient languages and a U.S. diplomat. New York City architect Lienau, who had trained under Henri Labrouste in France, loosely modeled this Renaissance Revival block on the Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève (1838–1850) in Paris, the leading exemplar of library architecture, particularly the decorative arcade and pilasters that wrap around the building. A tall staircase leads to one of the great spaces in Savannah, the double-height research library. The room retains its original bookcases, iron mezzanine railings, handsome long wooden research tables, vintage lights, and, as its focal point, the imposing portrait of Hodgson by Carl Ludwig Brandt. A discrete storage wing, the Edmund H. Abrahams Annex, was added to the south in 1970 and made handicapped accessible in 1988.