When completed, the building was lauded in the local newspaper as one of the finest depot hotels and dining establishments between New Orleans and Denver. Its owner, Italian immigrant Charles A. Ginocchio, came to Marshall in 1871, taking advantage of the city’s designation as the eastern terminus of the Texas and Pacific’s (T&P) transcontinental route. He profited from the railroad boom after the Civil War by operating a modest system of hotels and restaurants along rail lines in Arkansas and Texas, including the cities of Texarkana and Dallas. Ginocchio first engaged Lancaster of Marshall to design a two-story house (1886; 615 N. Washington) for his family across from the future hotel. The two-story red brick house features an irregular plan dominated by a corner tower with a pyramidal roof. Craftsmen from the nearby T&P shops were employed to mill the woodwork for the house’s interior. Ten years after completing the house, Ginocchio commissioned Lancaster to design his hotel. The two-and-a-half-story ell-shaped building was built adjacent to the railroad tracks opposite the Texas and Pacific depot. The north wing of the hotel’s first floor contained an elaborate lobby, dining room, and ballroom, all with double glass doors that opened onto a broad terrace facing the tracks, which facilitated the serving of buffet lunches to the trainloads of passengers heading west. The south wing of the building accommodated storefronts opening onto N. Washington. Forty guestrooms were located on the second and attic floors. The hotel has been stripped of its slender chimneys and the round turrets that flanked the central gables, and much of the building’s original detailing, including a corbeled cornice, is obscured beneath contemporary stucco. Despite these changes, the Ginocchio Hotel remains a formidable relic of the golden age of steam in East Texas.
Lancaster also designed the Meyers House (c. 1898), a one-story brick cottage with a tower-like polygonal corner bay, opposite Ginocchio’s house.