Weston hotel offers historic accommodations

The St. George Hotel in Weston, Mo.

It includes Valentino’s Champagne and Wine Bar, right, which features vaudeville-era photos from the Orval Hixon collection.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Weston, Mo., is much more than the boyhood home of Buffalo Bill Cody.

Anchored among the quaint shops and restaurants of Main Street, the St. George Hotel, completed in 1847, offers visitors historic accommodations, unique museum collections and fine dining, all under one roof.

“I think what makes our hotel a great destination is the amenities of our museums and our Frankish Empire cuisine,” says owner John Pottie.

Charlemagne’s restaurant, named for Pottie’s relationship to French royalty, offers a menu inspired by Northern Italian, French, German and Spanish influences and prepared by a European-trained chef. Patrons dine on tabletops milled from original salvaged wall timbers from the 1840s.

The hotel takes understandable pride in its many museum-quality collections.

Valentino’s Wine and Champagne Bar offers an extensive assortment of vaudeville-era photographs by Orval Hixon, including shots of a seductive 18-year-old Joan Crawford, a childhood Rose Marie and Rudolph Valentino. Hixon’s is among many vintage cameras on display.

The renowned Silk Art Museum, also located in the hotel, houses the largest collection of its kind in the world and attracted 30,000 visitors from 54 foreign countries last year, according to Pottie.

Twenty-six guest rooms, each with a different floor plan, include the Louis and Clark suite and the Orval Hixon suite.

“Home and Away” premieres at 6:30 p.m. Mondays on Sunflower Broadband Channel 6 and replays throughout the week.