This story was originally published by Richland Source in 2016.
The public square in Galion has a remarkable touchstone landmark that connects the present life of the city with its distant living history.
Today it is an apartment complex where seniors live, but for many decades of Galion’s past it was the Central Hotel.
Built originally in 1851, the hotel expanded in different eras to embrace the monumental presence it holds in the heart of town.
Like any hotel it has a kind of vitality and pulse that comes from all the countless guests passing through its doors for all those years on end.
Some of them were noteworthy characters from history — like Thomas Edison and Mark Twain — but most were folks like the background of an enormous epic film, who peopled the vast story of America, whose lives came from somewhere in the nation to intersect for a moment with the City of Galion.
