Lesesne-Stone Building
Georgetown, Williamson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(The KGTN Building) This limestone commercial structure was built in 1884 to house the Sanders & Lesesne Drugstore. It remained in use as a pharmacy for the next 76 years. William D. Nichols operated the drugstore from 1887 until 1892. In that year, Dr. Thomas B. Stone acquired the business, which was known as Stone's for more than 50 years. The Georgetown landmark, which exhibits Italianate influences, features arched windows and a pressed metal cornice. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1983
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the 1880s Georgetown was a growing Central Texas county seat, and its limestone commercial blocks reflected a new prosperity. This Italianate storefront, raised in 1884, housed a drugstore that served townsfolk for three-quarters of a century, passing from Sanders & Lesesne to the long-running Stone's pharmacy. Its arched windows and pressed-metal cornice mark the era's confident Main Street architecture.
Why it matters
Small-town drugstores were community anchors, and surviving 19th-century storefronts like this preserve the texture of everyday commercial life in a maturing frontier county seat.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1880s, Georgetown was a Central Texas county seat coming into its prosperity. The uncertainties of the earlier frontier were giving way to permanence, and nothing signaled that new confidence like durable stone commercial buildings rising around the courthouse square. This was the Gilded Age on a small-town scale — a period of steady building and civic ambition.
Central Texas gave its towns a distinctive material: local limestone, pale and workable, quarried nearby and laid up into solid storefronts meant to last. A limestone commercial block was a statement that a business — and the town around it — intended to stay.
The architecture of the moment favored a genteel richness. Italianate influences — arched windows, decorative cornices, a sense of ornamented order — dressed up Main Streets across the maturing frontier. A building raised in Georgetown in 1884 belongs to that wave of confident, ornamented commercial construction.
People & events
This limestone structure was built in 1884 to house the Sanders & Lesesne Drugstore, and remarkably it remained a pharmacy for the next seventy-six years — three-quarters of a century of the same essential trade at one address. Few buildings serve a single purpose so faithfully for so long.
Its stewards changed over the decades. William D. Nichols operated the drugstore from 1887 until 1892, when Dr. Thomas B. Stone acquired the business. Under him it became known simply as Stone's, a name it carried for more than fifty years — long enough that generations of townspeople would have known the place by that single word.
The building itself, later known as the KGTN Building, wears its era on its face. Its Italianate influences show in the arched windows and a pressed metal cornice, the kind of manufactured architectural detail that let a small-town storefront put on a dignified public face. In 1983 it was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.
Its place in the American story
The corner drugstore was one of the great institutions of American community life. More than a place to fill prescriptions, it was a gathering point, a source of remedies and advice, and often a fixture that anchored a town's Main Street for generations. A pharmacy that ran continuously for seventy-six years is a near-perfect emblem of that role.
The long proprietorships tell the national story too. Businesses like Stone's, tied to a family name for half a century, were the connective tissue of small-town America — the enterprises that gave a place its continuity and its sense of itself.
And the building embodies the architecture of the country's maturing 19th-century towns. As frontier settlements settled into permanence, they clothed their commerce in styles like the Italianate, complete with mass-produced pressed-metal cornices shipped to Main Streets everywhere. Surviving storefronts like this one preserve the physical texture of that broad American transition from frontier to established town.
If you visit
Stand across the street first, so you can take in the whole facade the way a passerby would have in 1884. Look up to the pressed metal cornice crowning the building — pressed metal was the era's clever way of giving an ordinary storefront elaborate ornament — and follow the line of the arched windows that give the front its Italianate rhythm.
Then consider the stone itself. This is Central Texas limestone, and its pale, solid presence is part of what has carried the building through well over a century. Buildings like this were made to endure, and this one has.
Georgetown's historic square is one of the best-preserved in Texas, and this landmark is part of that ensemble. Make it a stop on a slow walk around the district, and let it prompt the imagination: three-quarters of a century of one storefront, from Sanders & Lesesne to the long era of Stone's, all behind these limestone walls.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Thomas B. Stone
- · William D. Nichols
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Old Dimmitt Building
Georgetown, TX
Erected in 1901 as a hotel, the Dimmitt Building rose just as Georgetown settled into a prosperous county-seat town. Over the decades it reinvented itself again and again, serving as mercantile stores, the town's first movie house, an auto dealership, a drugstore, a dental office, and a bus depot. A 1960 remodeling preserved its native-stone Spanish arches, columns, and turrets.
In Memory of George Washington Glasscock, Sr.
Georgetown, TX
George Washington Glasscock came to Texas in 1834 and fought for its independence from Mexico, having already served in the Black Hawk War alongside frontier volunteers. A surveyor, soldier, and legislator, he helped organize Williamson County and donated land for its seat, which was named Georgetown in his honor. Both a Texas city and a county bear his name.
Williamson County
Georgetown, TX
Carved out of the young state of Texas in 1848, Williamson County took its name from Robert McAlpin Williamson — the peg-legged "Three-Legged Willie," a San Jacinto veteran and early justice of the Republic's Supreme Court. Georgetown grew as the seat of a county whose blackland and prairie soils drew a strikingly mixed population of Anglo, Czech, German, Mexican, Swedish, and — as the supplemental plaque records — a large community of African Americans, who made up nearly a fifth of residents by 1860. Early mills turned out lumber, flour, and cloth, and Southwestern University traced its charter back to the Republic itself.
Georgetown Fire House and Old City Hall
Georgetown, TX
By the 1890s Georgetown had grown enough to need a proper seat of government, and in 1892 it gathered its civic functions under one roof. This building held the mayor's office, council chambers, jail, fire department, and even the water company, a compact expression of a maturing frontier town. It survives as one of the few 19th-century combined city hall–fire stations left in Texas.