Girard is the county seat of Crawford County. Out in front of the county courthouse is a nice big lawn, complete with a gazebo and a helicopter on display honoring the town's veterans.
Downtown are some shops and a bar called "Bender on 7." The town also has a park, a swimming pool, and a lovely sesquicentennial display of decorative quilt squares.
Perhaps surprisingly to those who know Kansas as a solid "Red State" Republican party holdout, Girard used to be a bastion of the Socialist Party, especially from the 1890s through the 1920s. Fred Warren, a citizen of Girard, commissioned Upton Sinclair to write The Jungle, and the notorious Socialist politician Eugene V. Debs lived in the town in the early 1900s.
