Got $10 million? Savannah’s historic Cotton Exchange is for sale.

The red-brick building, completed in 1887, sits on Factors Walk, just above River Street, with views of the Savannah River and an unblocked vista of Drayton Street.

Dicky Mopper, a partner with Engels & Völkers and a sales agent for the property, has been selling real estate in Savannah for 57 years and has served on the board of the Savannah Historic Foundation. He said he’s never seen a more prominent historic building come on the Savannah market in that time.

“It is absolutely one of the most iconic buildings in Savannah,” Mopper said. “It’s in the heart of the historic district. It’s a great event space. The types of uses include a restaurant or a hotel, an international private club, or a museum. We don’t think it is impossible that it would be somebody’s personal residence.”

Credit: Andrew Frazier/Engels and Völkers

Credit: Andrew Frazier/Engels and Völkers

The four-story, terra-cotta-colored building was built by Boston architect William Gibbons Preston, who also built the original DeSoto Hotel in Savannah and the Volunteer Guards Armory, which now houses the Savannah College of Art & Design’s Poetter Hall on Bull Street. The Cotton Exchange has fanciful touches on the exterior, including faux columns and balustrades, and a fountain at the front of the building, dominated by a gryphon, a mythic creature that is part lion, part eagle.

As a historic property, the exterior of the building is subject to strict standards, though the interior is not. Unlike many historic buildings in the city, much of its original interior design elements remain, including the exchange’s trading floor, fireplace inserts, 30-foot coffered ceilings, a stained-glass window and hand-carved woodwork. The building was one of the first in the world to be built over an existing city street, the Drayton Street ramp. It sits in an area of multiuse zoning, though mostly commercial.

Cotton was a big crop in Savannah before the Civil War, with the city exporting more than half a million bales of cotton a year. After the Cotton Exchange was built, that number grew to more than 2 million bales transported through the city annually. Even today, the Port of Savannah remains the busiest port in the U.S. for cotton shipments, accounting for 37% of U.S. exports in fiscal 2025.

In its heyday, the exchange’s trading floor set the price of cotton, and the boards that held the blackboards where prices were set remain. Factors, a term for merchants, brought samples to the exchange. The main stores of cotton were housed in nearby warehouses, where they could easily be loaded onto nearby ships for transport.

The boll weevil decimated cotton crops in the South, leading to the closure of the exchange in 1920. The city took possession of the building, though it sat unused until the 1950s, when the Chamber of Commerce moved in.

Credit: Andrew Frazier/Engels and Völkers

Credit: Andrew Frazier/Engels and Völkers

In 1976, the building was sold to Solomon’s Masonic Lodge 1, the current owner of the property. The lodge, which says it is the “oldest continuously operated English Constituted Lodge of Freemasons in the Western Hemisphere,” has ties to the colony’s founding and counts Georgia’s founder, James Edward Oglethorpe, among its original members.

The lodge can’t afford the upkeep and insurance on the 9,300-square-foot building because of the fraternal organization’s dwindling membership.

“We are operating at a deficit,” said Savannah attorney Darryl Gugig, who is the lodge’s treasurer. “The number of people who pay dues into the organization is declining, and our older members are passing away. We are burning through our endowment, and the members of the lodge rightly concluded that it would be wiser to find someplace else that we could use as a lodge.”

The lodge meets four times a month in the building. The throne in its ritual room was donated by George Washington. Gugig said the lodge hasn’t decided on its next home but that West Savannah’s Scottish Rite Masonic Center, which hosts other Masonic lodge meetings, could be a near-term landing spot.

Potential buyers include the city of Savannah and the Savannah College of Art & Design, or SCAD. Neither has put in a bid, but representatives for both have toured the building since it was put up for sale, according to Gugig. The city owns the nearby Thomas Gamble Building, and SCAD has bought many other Savannah historic properties.

“There are a lot of eyes on that building because of its historical significance,” said Detric Leggett, the alderman for Savannah’s District 2, where the Cotton Exchange is located.

Leggett added that having the city buy the property “isn’t off the table.”

“People like myself and the mayor (Van Johnson), people who understand what the value of that building is, would advocate that it be accessible to the public. We have to consider its historical value and economic value.”

SCAD didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday. If it bought the Cotton Exchange, the building would remain off the city’s tax rolls because of the college’s status as a nonprofit university.