Jefferson City
As Missouri’s capital, Jefferson City is “rich in history with a beautiful downtown district, so many fun family festivals and a thriving theater scene not many people know about,” said Brittney Mormann, communications manager for the Jefferson City Convention and Visitors Bureau.
At the Capitol Grounds complex, attendees can explore the Missouri State Capitol, the Carnahan Memorial Garden, the Elizabeth Rozier Gallery and the Lohman Building Store and Warehouse; all can provide guided group tours.
Just steps from the state capitol, the Capitol Plaza Hotel and Convention Center has 25,000 square feet of function space, including a 12,000-square-foot grand ballroom that can be divided into eight rooms; there are also several other meeting rooms.
In January, a new 131-room Holiday Inn with two conference rooms will open about two miles from the capitol, and developers plan to eventually build a 20,000-square-foot conference center there. On the grounds of the Turkey Creek Golf Center, construction is underway on the Capital Bluffs Event Center, slated to be complete by September 1.
At Avenue HQ, a 3,000-square-foot hall with exposed brick and stone walls can seat about 200 for meals. The venue sits across the street from the historic Missouri State Penitentiary, which was decommissioned in 2004. Groups can choose from a variety of guided prison tours — history, mystery or paranormal — and the prison even offers overnight experiences to investigate otherworldly activity.
St. Joseph
St. Joseph is “an old river town where the Pony Express started and Jesse James ended,” said Mary Supple, director of sales for the St. Joseph Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Pioneers headed to California and other Western destinations stopped for supplies in St. Joseph, which sits on the Missouri River.
The Stoney Creek Hotel and Conference Center has eight meeting rooms, the largest of which is the divisible 5,500-square-foot Frontier Room. A 169-room hotel that was most recently a Radisson before changing flags to Red Lion has 7,300 square feet of meeting space, Supple said.
Missouri Western State University offers planners several meeting options, including the Fulkerson Center, which can accommodate groups of 500 or be divided into three rooms. Spratt Hall, which has four conference rooms, also houses the Walter Cronkite Memorial, a museum-type exhibit in the atrium.
The university’s Griffin Indoor Sports Complex is home to the Kansas City Chiefs’ summer training camp, which visitors can visit to watch professional athletes train.
St. Joe also has 13 museums. Groups can tour or meet at the Pony Express Museum, the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art and the Glore Psychiatric Museum, where macabre exhibits explore the 130-year history of the adjacent state mental hospital and the odd and sometimes inhumane treatments used on patients.
