11. WOODROW WILSON'S LAW OFFICE,

44½ Marietta St., is a small, second-story room at the head of a narrow flight of stairs that leads directly from the street. Wilson's occupancy is commemorated by a bronze tablet on the Forsyth Street wall of the building and a framed feature story from the Atlanta Journal on the wall of the office.

Here, in the summer of 1882, immediately after he had received his license to practice as an attorney-at-law, Wilson was admitted to partnership with E.I. Renick, under the firm name of Renick and Wilson. But clients were scarce, and the young intellectual whiled away many empty hours watching from his office window the crowds that milled about the temporary State capitol across the square. Sometimes he sat in the galleries of the house and listened to the debates on the floor, afterward describing the representatives in letters to his friends as country lawyers, merchants, farmers, politicians, all of them poor, many densely ignorant... In September 1882, Walter Hines Page, who was traveling throughout the South for the New York World, called at Wilson's office, and the two men were attracted to each other instantaneously by the similarity of their ideas and tastes. It was Page who excited Wilson with enthusiasm for study at Johns Hopkins, and in the fall of 1883 the young lawyer gladly left slow, ignorant, uninteresting Georgia for the more congenial atmosphere of the university.

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