Kelly's Westport Inn, in front of you, is genuinely old — one of the oldest commercial structures in the Kansas City area still in continuous use. The stone building dates to approximately 1850, when it served as a general store owned by Albert Gallatin Boone, grandson of the legendary frontiersman Daniel Boone. Albert Boone was himself a significant figure in the westward trade, supplying wagon trains with everything they needed for the journey west.
The store would have been a chaotic, fragrant place — shelves of canned goods, bolts of fabric, coils of rope, barrels of gunpowder, and the constant traffic of emigrants, traders, and soldiers. When the Civil War disrupted the overland trade and the railroads eventually made the wagon trail obsolete, the building passed through various owners. It became a bar decades ago and has remained one ever since.
Kelly's is now one of the most popular nightlife spots in Kansas City, packed most weekends with a crowd that has no idea they are drinking beer in what was once the last general store before the American wilderness. History has a way of hiding in plain sight.