The Presidents and our town

In honor of President’s Day, I came up with a few questions about U.S. Presidents and their ties to Macon.
QUESTIONS
1. Who was the first U.S. President to visit Macon?
2. What major road in Macon is named after a U.S, president and why?
3. When President-elect Bill Clinton visited Macon in November 1992, what did he do that prompted photographs in national and international newspapers the next day?
4. What did Presidents William Howard Taft and George H.W. Bush have in common in their connection with Macon?
5. Who was the first U.S. President to visit Macon while in office?
6. What piece of presidential trivia is associated with the Dempsey Hotel in downtown Macon?
7. What was Woodrow Wilson’s connection with Macon?
8. Which U.S. President is credited with originating the famous advertising slogan for Maxwell House Coffee?
9. Which U.S. President evoked the “long, excellent tradition” of Georgia football on a campaign stop in Macon?
10. . What was the shortest visit by a U.S. President?

ANSWERS
1. It was Gen. Andrew Jackson, although he hadn’t been elected quite yet. Jackson came to Fort Hawkins in 1817 before the city had been created. Jackson was elected in 1828 and held office until 1836. (Macon became a city in 1823.)
2. Former Macon Mayor Ronnie "Machine Gun" Thompson named Eisenhower Parkway after Dwight Eisenhower. The two were friends, and Ike once endorsed Thompson for mayor.
3. He played the saxophone with the Central High School band in front of City Hall. The saxophone was never played again. You can see it today in the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.
4. Three years after Taft visited Macon in 1909, his wife, Helen Taft, had the first Yoshino cherry trees planted in Washington, D.C. Soon afterward, the nation's capital began holding a cherry blossom festival every year. In 1984, then-Vice-President George H.W. Bush visited Macon prior to the Cherry Blossom Festival and planted a ceremonial cherry tree near the intersection of Third and Cherry streets.
5. William McKinley, who won the Presidency over William Jennings Bryan in 1896, visited the city on Dec. 19, 1898. He was also the first Republican President to come here. He was re-elected in 1900 but was assassinated on Sept. 6, 1901.
6. At the time President Franklin Delano Roosevelt fell ill at Warm Springs on April 12, 1945, he was being visited by Lucy Mercer, who was alleged to be his mistress. When first lady Eleanor Roosevelt was immediately summoned to Warm Springs from Washington, Mercer and Madame Elizabeth Shoumatoff, the artist commissioned to paint a portrait of FDR, were rushed to a waiting car and hurried to Macon. They learned of Roosevelt's death when they checked into the Dempsey.
7. His uncle, after whom he had been named, had taught Macon’s most famous writer, poet Sidney Lanier, at Oglethorpe College. When Wilson campaigned in Macon in April 1912, he and his wife stayed at the Lanier House.
8. Teddy Roosevelt, who visited Macon in 1912, was an avid coffee drinker. While visiting the Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville, Tenn., he commented that the house blend coffee was “good to the last drop.’’
9. President Ronald Reagan, running for re-election in 1984, scored a touchdown in the eyes of the Bulldawg Nation when he made reference to the team in his speech on the steps of City Hall.
10. In 1921, Present-elect Warren G. Harding, on his way to St. Augustine, Fla., for a fishing trip, stopped through Macon on a train. He stayed for 10 minutes.