Hotel de Paris

Louis Dupuy came to Georgetown around 1870 to mine silver. An accident ended that, and on October 9, 1875, he opened a hotel and restaurant in a storefront that had housed the Delmonico Bakery. He added to it in masonry in 1878, 1882 and 1889, two-foot rubblestone walls plastered and scored to look like cut stone, until the building carried its French name across a painted banner of crossed French and American flags. For twenty-five years the dining room was the reason travelers stopped.

Dupuy talked readily about books and philosophy and very little about himself. He died in the hotel in October 1900 and left it to his housekeeper, Sophie Gally, who died there the following February. Only after his death did it come out that he had been born Adolphe François Gérard, in Alençon, and had deserted from the U.S. Army before he reinvented himself in the mountains.

Sarah Burkholder bought the place from Gally's heirs and ran it with her daughter Hazel as a boarding house until 1939. In 1954 the Colorado chapter of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America bought it, with much of Dupuy's furniture, for $15,100, and has run it as a museum ever since. Among what turned up was a cellar stocked with labels from twenty-eight French wines, ready to be pasted on bottles filled closer to home. The hotel was a large part of why the Georgetown-Silver Plume National Historic Landmark District was created in 1966.