Franklin House Hotel

Franklin House Hotel. c. 1853. The Franklin House Hotel was erected c. 1853 and was first known as the Philadelphia House, after the Philadelphia and Erie Railroad which passed nearby. Managed early on by George W. Boyer, it quickly became a favorite lodging and meeting facility for the growing city. It was the site of the first meeting of the St. Marys chapter of the Kiwanis Club, which met here for many years thereafter. The early decades of the twentieth century, when the hotel was new, marked an era of significant change in St. Marys, particularly with the development of the pressed metal industry which would become an economic mainstay of the community for generations. , As originally built, the Franklin House more closely resembled a late Victorian hotel, with its red brick finish and Mansard roof penetrated by dormers and distinguished by a double-gallery porch along the facade. By the 1920s, it was managed by Leander and Kunigunda Hacherl. , In June, 1922, the top story was destroyed by a fire and was replaced by the hipped roof which capped the building for the next eight decades. It may have been at that time that the building was faced in buff-colored brick and the name changed to the "New" Franklin Hotel. The double porch was probably replaced by Neo-Classical Revival-style porticos at about the same time. Fire again visited the historic hotel in 2000, this time destroying the entire building.