Set up like an old railroad station, the Depot Inn and Suites signals its customers with its friendly atmosphere just as the trains that pass through signal their presence with a blow of a whistle.

The Depot Inn and Suites, located off Highway 63 in La Plata, Mo., first opened its doors in May 2006. Kelly and Thomas O. Marshall, owners of the Depot Inn and Suites, said they discussed the possibility of starting their own hotel for quite some time before actually acting on it.

“Kelly and I, for a number of years, have always talked about how owning a hotel would be kind of fun,” Tom said. “Then when the new highway development started and we knew there was a new restaurant going in and all this new development, we decided that this spot was really good. We’re just a nine-minute drive from Kirksville.”

The advantage of having any business in a close location to Kirksville is that it attracts a large amount of college students and their families from Truman State University, Tom said.

  “There is also a huge need in northeast Missouri, mainly because of Truman,” Tom said. “When you have only 360 hotel rooms in northeast Missouri and you have 6,000 college students and family, it creates quite a problem.”

There is always some overflow of parents looking for rooms at the last minute, said Donna Hettinger, manager of the Depot Inn and Suites. Often, they are parents who have not visited their kids in college before and aren’t aware they have to plan ahead so early, she said.

“We did send fliers to Truman parents because there’s just not enough rooms in Kirksville,” Hettinger said. “ … We’ve even had people call who had rooms in Columbia who are just looking for a place closer.”

Hettinger said relationships with local competitors have been mutually beneficial.

“All the Kirksville hotels and Macon, also, have been very generous with us in passing our name along and we do the same with them if people call and we have no rooms,” Hettinger said. “I feel like it’s a fairly friendly arrangement.”

First-time visitors in the area might find the train theme to be oddly placed along Highway 63, but the theme of the hotel makes sense to those who know the history.

“We looked at our town’s history, which is very heavily railroad, because we’ve had two major railroads – that’s what made La Plata for the past 150 years,” Tom said. “So we felt strongly that a railroad theme would be the right theme and then we could focus on our history.”

The town of La Plata has always relied heavily on the railroad industry for economic and financial support, Tom said. One way to emphasize this was to include period artifacts within the hotel, he said.

“The hotel is kind of a mixture between a hotel and a museum,” Tom said. “We did that mainly because that’s part of our theme, but also because when we started on this project we realized we had an opportunity for the local people and people of northeast Missouri, and all over the United States if you want to actively participate in the display of pictures and memorabilia.”

In the process of finalizing their decision to build the hotel, the Marshalls visited several hotels across the country similar to what they had in mind. The Stanley Hotel, located in Estes Park, Colo., and the Cliff House in Manitou Springs, Colo., are just two of the hotels that helped inspire them to start their own, Kelly said.

Tom and Kelly returned from their short vacation with visions of what they had in mind for the Depot Inn and Suites. They immediately began collecting train artifacts to heighten the railroad theme.

“When we decided to do the hotel, we decided that we wanted to do something fairly ornate,” Tom said. “We wanted the prices to be competitive with other hotels, but we wanted our customers to feel like they really got a great deal. We wanted to be super family-oriented so we have a lot of built-in family activities in this hotel.”

Kelly said they wanted to make sure there were plenty of leisurely activities suitable for guests of all ages. These include complimentary access to the pool tables, movie and bicycle rentals, a putting green, a small basketball court, a playground and the 16-by-40 foot indoor heated pool.
The train rides that Tom’s father, Harold, provides in good weather also are a big attraction. The small locomotive stationed on the front lawn of the hotel waits for passengers next to the children’s toy shop.

With Tom’s custom-crafting expertise and Kelly’s interior design skills, the two were able to decide on the cohesive, aesthetic look of the hotel fairly easily.

“Tom and I don’t disagree very often,” Kelly said. “The vast majority of the time, we are right on the same page … I had a friend of mine tell me that when we were working on this project we were like two kids in a candy store.”

Constructing the Depot Inn and Suites took a rather short period of time, mainly through the winter season, Tom said. It took two months to break ground and lay the foundation for the building, and then exactly five months and 25 days to complete.

“Something we’re very proud of is that it was all built by local, small contracting companies,” Tom said. “ … There is a plaque out [in the lobby] that has probably got about 100 names on it of all the men and women that were involved in building this hotel. And we’re very proud of the fact that we were able to build this hotel as fancy as it is in such a super short period of time. And it was all by people coming together, and working together and getting along.”

The hotel has 30 rooms, four of which are themed suites. The standard rooms are $89 a night and include a DVD/VCR player, wireless internet and a refrigerator/microwave combination.

Customers looking for a more unique stay in one of the four themed suites can do so for $120 a night. The extra provisions, which include a large flat screen TV, memory foam mattress, pull-out sofa bed, electric fireplace and a jacuzzi, are well worth the $5,000 value of the room.
The interior design of the Victorian suite tends to appeal more to women, Kelly said. The Western suite has a more universal theme, while the Sportsman suite encompasses hunting, fishing and golf themes, she said.

The most unique suite was named after the old Pullman cars and was designed to appeal to railroad fans, Kelly said.

“The rail fans and their families, they’re people that love to watch trains – just like some people like to watch birds, some people like to play golf, some people want to watch sports,” Tom said. “Rail fans like to travel to a destination and watch freight trains go by. And that’s what they do, and they do it by the thousands.”

Although Tom and Kelly carefully designed their hotel around the railroad theme, they were not prepared for the amount of interest they would get from rail fans and rail businesses.

It all began one morning shortly after the grand opening when Tom decided to purchase a bulk order of train whistles to hand out to the guests. He called TrainParty, then located in Fullerton, Calif., and before he realized it, he was inviting the owner and his four partners to La Plata and footing their bill.

Ray Burns, co-owner of TrainParty and TrainWeb, and his associates flew to La Plata the next day. They stayed for four days, learning the history, touring the surrounding area and falling head over heels for La Plata and the Depot Inn and Suites.

“They really fell in love with this area,” Tom said. “And to keep a long story short, TrainParty and TrainWeb now reside in La Plata.”

Tom said that TrainWeb, a Web site for information about trains and train products, had already been looking to relocate to the Midwest to reduce shipment expenses. The company had originally found land in Liberty, Mo., but not until their visit to La Plata did they truly find their home.

“We are in the process of forming a new business relationship with them,” Tom said. “The Depot Inn and Suites and TrainWeb are forming a new venture together, and we are going to start marketing to northeast Missouri and worldwide to rail fans … And we are going to be building on a huge addition to this hotel with this new company.”

What started out as a dream for the Marshalls sprouted into a larger-than-life reality that they never could have imagined.

“One of the other things that I think was a direct result of the hotel is that it really brought the community together in an effort to build something,” Kelly said. “The local community has been extremely supportive.”

Both Kelly and Tom said it is important to include the local community in such a big investment, especially when it is a small town like La Plata.

“We kind of feel like if you expect the local people to support an endeavor, you need to support them,” Tom said. “Money’s not everything; sometimes you can get something cheaper from another place. But yet, if you can help a neighbor make a living, you’re better off to stay local and help the people that are going to help you. It also keeps your resources local. If we spend our money locally, they’ll spend their money locally, and it helps the community as a whole.”

Tom said that part of helping the community and keeping resources local is accomplished through employment. Rather than publishing advertisements to staff the hotel, Tom and Kelly said they often just approached people in the community they already knew would be good employees.

“A big part of our goal was to create good jobs and have fun building this thing,” Tom said. “ … We feel like it’s going to be unique enough and nice enough to where it will hopefully be a historic hotel.”

Photos by Chris Tharp