The Grim Building: Following One Kirksville Building Through a Century of Uses

The Grim Building was built for doctors, but it was not simply a hospital.

The structure at 113–115 E. Washington St. was designed as a professional building with medical offices, examination and operating space, and additional rentable offices.

That mixed professional purpose helped it remain useful long after its original physicians were gone.

Built in 1905

City and National Register records date the building to 1905.

Physicians Ezra and Edward Grim commissioned the structure.

National Register metadata associates the design with Weber & Groves and architect Albert Bartleton Groves.

The building's original purpose reflected Kirksville's growing medical economy in the early 20th century.

The Grim brothers practiced there

Historic material says the building included doctors' offices and specialized medical rooms.

Other office space could be rented to professionals.

Ezra Grim later shifted his work after a separate hospital was built on East Patterson around 1909.

Edward Grim continued practicing in the Grim Building until 1936.

That distinction matters because it shows the building adapting even during the original ownership era.

It was a professional building, not one fixed institution

The building's history makes more sense when viewed as a durable shell for changing professional and commercial uses.

Ownership and tenancy were not always the same thing.

National Register material traces later ownership through members of the Grim family and several later owners during the 1960s and 1970s.

The complete tenant list across more than a century has not yet been reconstructed.

Historic recognition arrived before the modern preservation era was finished

The Grim Building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 27, 1979.

Kirksville also recognizes it as a local historic resource.

City material notes that the building has continued to serve business or commercial purposes since its construction.

That continuity is one reason adaptive reuse is central to its story.

A carriage house survives

City landmark material says the associated carriage house still exists.

That surviving secondary structure helps preserve more of the original property arrangement than the main commercial façade alone would suggest.

What about the demolition story?

Secondary local histories describe a later threat of demolition for parking and a preservation effort.

That account is plausible and important.

The current research cache, however, does not yet contain enough primary City or newspaper documentation to publish an exact demolition-threat chronology with confidence.

So the safer statement is that preservation became part of the building's later history without inventing dates or actors not yet firmly documented.

Architecture and costs

National Register nomination text contains detailed construction information, including contractor bids and total project costs.

Those figures still need visual confirmation against the nomination pages before being treated as final quoted numbers.

The architectural identification itself is secure enough to establish the building as a designed early-20th-century professional structure rather than an anonymous storefront.

Why the Grim Building matters

The building demonstrates a pattern seen throughout old downtowns:

specialized original purpose → changing professional use → changing ownership → historic recognition → continued commercial reuse

That is a different kind of preservation from a museum.

The building survived because it kept doing work.

Its medical origin is the first chapter, not the whole book.