Galena offers attractions tied to its local history, Route 66, mining, and natural landscape. Howard "Pappy" Litch Memorial Park, named for a local historian and once a federal weigh station, includes an original 1952 Will Rogers Highway plaque from the Missouri-Kansas border. In downtown Galena, historic buildings reflect the town's past, while in East Galena older buildings have been repurposed for new businesses, including the Main Street Deli in the former annex and bank vault of the Miners' & Merchants' Bank and the Galena Mining and Historical Museum in a relocated Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad depot. The road between Galena and Riverton that became Route 66 began as a cow path, gained a bridge over the Spring River by 1910, saw further improvements in 1922 and 1923 through Federal Highway Act funds and local businessmen, and included a 215-foot viaduct built in 1923 across railroad tracks to connect with Main Street; because it predated Route 66 by three years, it became part of the highway's alignment, which also used historic 1920s culverts and was fully paved by 1928, making it one of the first paved roads in Kansas. Schermerhorn Park began with the acquisition of land on Shoal Creek in 1922 for a city park, and during the 1930s and 1940s the Works Progressive Administration built stone terracing and other features there. Today the Southeast Kansas Nature Center, managed by Kansas Department of Wildlife Parks and Tourism, occupies the former Boy Scout meeting hall overlooking the park and creek and interprets the grounds, trails, cave, and creek. The park preserves part of the 55-square-mile Kansas Ozark Plateau, whose cherry limestone formed in ancient seas about 345 million years ago and now contains caves, sinkholes, streams, and cliffs, including the half-mile-deep Schermerhorn Cave. Although the soils are poorly suited to agriculture, the area held substantial lead and zinc deposits, and the park also contains the oldest surface rocks in Kansas, Ozark oak and hickory hardwood forests on many hillsides, and tallgrass prairie on some hilltops.
