Three stories tall, the Winter Building beside you began life as a bank branch with a telegraph office upstairs. Erected from 1841 to 1843 for John Gindrat, a cotton broker and banker, it passed into the hands of his daughter Mary Elizabeth Gindrat and her husband Joseph S. Winter in 1854. Designed in the Italianate architectural style, the building's second floor became the Southern Telegraph Company during the American Civil War of 1861–1865.
It was here that LeRoy Pope Walker, the Confederate States Secretary of War, sent a telegram to General P. G. T. Beauregard advising him to fire on Fort Sumter, an act that set in motion the Battle of Fort Sumter. The Winter Building stayed in the same family as late as the 1970s, by then housing offices and a clothing store, and was recognized for its significance when it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 14, 1972. Picture clerks and telegraph operators once moving through these rooms, and notice the Italianate details of the three-story façade framing this slice of Montgomery history.