Picture Courtesy of Historic Preservation Program, Missouri Department of Natural Resources

Picture Courtesy of Jim Kuntz

Picture Courtesy of Jim Kuntz

Picture Courtesy of Jim Kuntz

For more than a century, the Martin family sheltered and fed many weary travelers passing through Versailles. In November 1853, Virginians Samuel and Elizabeth Martin pulled their wagon into Versailles, then little more than a clearing with a few houses and weed-filled streets. The second day there they met a woman who operated a rooming house and offered her lease to the Martins for one hundred dollars a year.

The couple started their business with two extra beds and a dining room table where guests ate with the family. Deer steaks were a staple, and their daughter Lucy's eighteen-egg angel food cake became well known. Rates were one dollar a day -- twenty-five cents a meal for three meals and twenty-five cents for a bed. After a year, the Martins bought a lot from the city for three hundred dollars, which included the log building they used as a hotel before erecting a frame structure in 1877 and an adjoining brick building in the 1880s.

During the Civil War, the Martins fed both Union and Confederate troops on IOUs that were never paid. Mrs. Martin said she never had any trouble "except the time the Federals were going to shoot my husband." Versailles was not a friendly place for a Southern sympathizer. Their daughter Sally, who was crippled, went to the courthouse on her crutches and begged for mercy for her father. The soldiers decided the girl needed him more than the North needed his life. Martin also recalled when a dozen Northerners came to look for two rebels they suspected were hiding in the hotel. After a fruitless search, the men ate and left, never discovering that she had disguised one of the soldiers as a woman -- who had served the table where his enemies sat.

Over the years thousands of salesmen, stagecoach travelers, and train passengers boarded at the hotel. P.T. Barnum and Jesse James were among its guests.

After Elizabeth Martin died in 1930 at 103, her daughters continued to operate the hotel. In 1954, Lucy's nephew, Foster Brown, assumed management, and thirteen years later, the Morgan County Historical Society purchased the frame half of the hotel, restored several rooms and opened a museum. In 1974 the society purchased the brick side, and in 1978 the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

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Jim Kuntz: ... Top Photo: A group poses in front of the original Martin Hotel around 1880. The 1877 frame building, still standing today, can be seen to the left of the log portion, which was dismantled to make way for a brick addition. 1 May 28, 2007

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