Site of St. James Hotel

Kemp's partner had come a long way to Wichita Falls. Morris Lasker was born in Lask, in Prussian Poland, emigrated at sixteen and peddled his way to Texas, clerking in Weatherford in 1860. He fought Apaches under George W. Baylor and served the Confederacy under John S. (Rip) Ford. A Galveston wholesale grocer by the 1870s, he lost everything in the depression of 1893 and sent his family to Germany while he rebuilt. Around 1906 he bought the Texas Star Flour Mill and expanded it to include properties in Wichita Falls and Waco. He died in Galveston in 1916.

What the plaque says

Joseph Alexander Kemp (1861-1930), a Wichita Falls merchant, and Morris Lasker (1840-1916), a native of Prussia who later served as state senator from Galveston, formed a partnership in 1892 for the construction of a hotel at this site. Built by Myles O'Reilly, the three-story St. James Hotel was completed one year later and became the center of area social events. Guests were attracted by the good food and by the music of a hotel orchestra. Business began to decline as new hotels opened in the area and in 1929 the building was demolished. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• World's Littlest Skyscraper — steps away
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.
• Kell House Museum — 0.6 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 12 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.
• Clay County 1890 Jail Museum — 18 mi
  Henrietta's 1890 stone jail a block from the domed courthouse, now the county museum, with its original cells, a gallows that was never used and the sheriff's family quarters.

More markers nearby

• Charlye Ola Farris — 0.3 mi
• Joseph Hudson Barwise — 0.3 mi
• Texas Governor James V. Allred — 0.3 mi
• First County Officials — 0.3 mi