Endangered:

Thacher Building

The Thacher Building is a three-story Richardson Romanesque commercial building in downtown Topeka. Built in 1888 at a cost of about $40,000, the stone structure is a two-part commercial block form. The stone balustrade capping the building contains a nameplate inscribed “THACHER.” The Thacher Building was constructed for Timothy Dwight Thacher, a local businessman, using cottonwood limestone. Thacher settled in Topeka in the 1850s and helped establish the Kansas Republican Party in 1859. The original architectural plans for the Thacher Building by John Gideon Haskell survive; Haskell also designed the Kansas Statehouse. Not many other commercial buildings downtown from the Topeka building boom era survive so intact. The building was listed on its own in the National Register in 1975 and as a contributing building in the South Kansas Avenue Commercial Historic District in 2015.