According to legend around Tolu, if you touch or step on a certain rock - no one seems to know for sure just where or which stone it is - that you will always come back to the small Ohio River town.
But in July 1983 some regularly attending members of the yearly Tolu School Reunion got together and had Henry and Henry Monuments create a real Tolu Touchstone.
At this time there was a large number of the past school students and teachers who would attend these yearly gatherings at Tolu.
The simple inscription engraved in the face of the rock, "Welcome Home," meant a lot to some of the Tolu graduates that would come from many places to visit their former friends and classmates from Tolu School.
The stone sits on a masonry foundation built by Darrell Sherer in front of the steps to the former Tolu Methodist Church site across from the old Tolu Bank building on the corner of First Street and Orchard Avenue.
The crowd this day in July 1983 gathered around the stone, some placed pennies on the stone for good luck and in hopes they would be able to return the next years for the reunion.
When one bystander was asked if he had anything to say, he quietly answered, "Just being here is enough."
The group slowly made its way back up toward the school building and everyone stopped and placed their hands on the Touchstone.
Now the legend of Tolu will last as long as the stone itself.
These were wonderful times, all of these early reunion attendees are gone now, and the wonderful rural school closed its doors in 1998 to the so-called sound of progress and the students were then bused to the Elementary and Middle school at Marion.
The Tolu community still has the annual school reunion in the summertime, I wonder now if any of these later graduates of the school know the history of the "Tolu Touchstone."
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