First Hilton Hotel

Cisco, Texas

Eager travelers should know that they can no longer stay in the world's first Hilton hotel. It was restored by the Hilton Foundation and turned into the Cisco, Texas, Chamber of Commerce office and community center. But two of its rooms have been preserved as they were in 1919, and a third serves as a small museum.

Legend has it that Conrad Hilton, who was in Cisco to buy a local bank, simply bought the Mobley Hotel when he couldn't get a room in town. But the more likely story is that he bought it because he saw how much money it was making by renting its rooms to oil field workers in eight-hour shifts (Hotels, thankfully, do not follow that practice with families on vacation).

Hilton abandoned thoughts of a career in banking and instead began buying hotels -- creating yet another tourist attraction in nearby Abilene, which is the home of the former Windsor Hotel, "the first hotel to bear Conrad Hilton's name."