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.
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jrlii (anonymous) says…
The first art exhibit I ever went to was of the Hixon Collection at the old Spooner Art Museum.
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Back in the '60s, I had a friend who lived next door to the long-retired Orval HIxon.
Well, a raccoon had been getting into people's trash around the neighborhood, and then it stopped.
One night, a week or so after the garbage can raids ended there were brilliant lights in my friend's back yard. He went to look, and there was Mr. Hixon with a large view camera photographing the raccoon he'd been luring into a good position for a picture.
You've got to admire photographers of that generation and before: While they mostly worked under controlled studio conditions, they didn't shoot dozens of photos to get one keeper. In most cases it was one, maybe two exposures to the subject, and nonetheless they produced good and sometimes even great photos.