The Pickler’s Famous Building: The Story Behind a Downtown Kirksville Landmark

The Pickler's Famous building at 114 W. Harrison St. links two parts of Kirksville history that are often discussed separately.

One is the commercial life of the Courthouse Square.

The other is Samuel Pickler's long connection with the institution that became Truman State University.

The building dates to 1887

National Register-derived Courthouse Square records date the Pickler's Famous Store building to 1887.

It stands on the north side of the Square and later became part of the Kirksville Courthouse Square Historic District, listed in 2009.

The current address is 114 W. Harrison.

Who was Samuel Pickler?

Truman's historical biographies say Pickler moved to Kirksville in 1866.

He was connected with the North Missouri Normal School as a student and faculty member before becoming a businessman and civic figure.

He also owned and edited the Kirksville Journal from 1873 to 1881.

By the 1880s and 1890s, his mercantile business known as Pickler's Famous had become one of the better-known stores on the north side of the Square.

What did the store sell?

Historical advertising research identifies Pickler's Famous as a mercantile and dry-goods operation.

Period advertisements point toward goods such as clothing-related merchandise, furnishings, carpets and shoes.

Because the surviving advertisements still need page-by-page visual verification, exact product wording should be treated as a research lead rather than quoted as settled catalog copy.

The important point is that Pickler's Famous was a broad downtown mercantile business, not a specialty shop in the modern sense.

Pickler's later Truman connection

After the 1924 fire destroyed major campus buildings, Samuel Pickler donated $25,000 toward a new library.

Pickler Memorial Library ultimately carried his name.

That later gift can make it easy to remember Pickler only as a University benefactor.

The downtown building preserves the earlier commercial side of his life.

The building survived changes downtown

Like many long-lived commercial structures, the building outlasted the original business that gave it its historical name.

Later owners and tenants changed.

The full chain from Pickler's mercantile era through every later occupant has not yet been reconstructed from directories and property records.

That gap should remain visible.

Restoration brought the historic façade back into view

Local preservation material credits later restoration work with uncovering or restoring upper-story windows and façade elements that had been obscured by later alterations.

The exact restoration chronology still needs stronger City, Historic Preservation Commission or National Register documentation before every detail is treated as final.

What is clear is that the building survived long enough to become part of downtown preservation efforts rather than being replaced.

The building remains in commercial reuse

Current 2026 listings continue to show active commercial use at 114 W. Harrison.

Because tenants can change, the safest historical statement is that the building remains adaptively reused rather than freezing one business name into a permanent article.

Why it matters

The Pickler's Famous building connects:

• an 1880s downtown merchant;
• the Courthouse Square retail economy;
• Samuel Pickler's later educational philanthropy;
• modern preservation and reuse.

For the larger downtown story, see How Kirksville’s Courthouse Square Changed From the 1890s to Today once that research is complete.

A building can survive long after the store name over the door disappears.

In this case, the old store name survived too.