The History of the Charles Wesley Motel
The hotel opened in 1911 as a sawmill boarding house operated by Dora Wood and assisted by her 11 year-old son, Charles Wesley Kemp. The name stuck. In 1934 the 12 room hotel was bought by Ross and Bobbie Wrights who tried to change the name to the Wrights Hotel but we couldn’t, Mrs. Wright said. “We even went so far as to have room key tags made but peopl
e kept calling it the Charles Wesley and finally we gave up.” Besides a local clientele and sales people, prominent guests at the hotel were Carl Albert and Robert S. Wrights recalled the eccentric governor could spit to***co juice in every corner of his room. I told him to quit doing it but “it didn’t do any good.”
Maintaining a permanent residence and a home life in a hotel was not new to Bobbie Wrights. She grew up in the Cooper House, owned and operated by her parents, Willam and Nancy Cooper, in Valliant. However, Mrs. Wrights said her husband Ross did most of the work and that it was a job that took “from daylight until dark. We served three meals a day – at mealtime. We didn’t say open all day like they do now.”
The Wrights’ two daughters, Marian Dale and Charlene Larcade, grew up in the rambling white structure. Larcade remembers it as being “like one big family. There were many salesmen who came regularly. We knew them all”. I remember sitting in my mother’s lap in one of the big rockers in the lobby or front porch. It was a good life. We enjoyed it, she said. The only shortcoming was the lack of privacy. “Everything we did, everybody knew about”, she noted. Larcade, her late husband and Marian and Charles Dale joined Bobbie Wrights in building the new Charles Wesley Restaurant and Motel which opened April 12, 1965. The old hotel was torn down and its remains were burned after the present Charles Wesley was completed. Mrs. Wrights said she had to leave home that evening…there were too many memories going up in smoke. Of the many guests and the meals they enjoyed, what lasting impression is left with the “lady of the house” at the Charles Wesley? Bobbie Wrights looked back through the years and said, “We bought it for a song and sang it ourselves.”
