History

Memphis in the 1920s was the commercial capital of the Mid-South — the largest city on the Mississippi River between St. Louis and New Orleans, a center of cotton trading, hardwood lumber, and the nascent blues music industry that was transforming American popular music. The Union Avenue commercial corridor, running east from the river through the downtown grid, was the address of the city’s banks, hotels, and department stores. When the rebuilt Peabody opened in 1925 with its Italian Renaissance Revival lobby of Tennessee marble and ornamental bronze, it became immediately what the original Peabody had been: the hotel where Memphis society met, where cotton merchants closed their deals, where politicians made their arrangements, and where visiting artists and celebrities stayed.

The Duck March began in the 1930s as a prank by the hotel’s general manager and a group of hunting companions who had one night too many and thought it would be amusing to put live ducks in the lobby fountain. The ducks stayed. The ritual evolved, over the following decades, into a formal ceremony with a dedicated Duckmaster, a red carpet rolled out by the Duckmaster from the elevator to the fountain, and crowds of hundreds gathering in the lobby at 11:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. to watch the procession. The five Mallards who serve as the Peabody ducks at any one time are selected from farms in the region, stay at the hotel for three months, and are then retired and replaced — a rotation that has continued without interruption since the ceremony was formalized in 1940.

The Peabody closed in 1975 during the worst period of downtown Memphis disinvestment and reopened in 1981 after a major restoration that returned the lobby and public rooms to their 1925 character. The 1981 reopening was a landmark event in downtown Memphis’s revival, and the Peabody has operated continuously since then as the city’s most prestigious hotel address.