Thomas Mercantile

Thomas Mercantile in Swan Lake, Idaho, has been a local gem for over 100 years. We visited Karen Engelmann to hear how she was able to restore and reopen the Thomas Merc in her local community. David Sparks Idaho AG today. Speaker2: Was originally built around 1910. The Thomas brothers rode into town, found a little store called Thomas Mercantile. It was on the other side of the railroad tracks and they ended up buying it, and they ran the store there for a while, and then they decided they wanted to expand it. So they moved the whole store over here. That was in between 1910 and 1923. It was run continuously by Thomas family members until 2017, when the owner at the time closed it. And then he passed away suddenly in 2020, and the family decided to sell the building. And I had been looking for a historic building here in Idaho to work on and restore. As I researched, as I talked to people who'd come here and the significance of it to them, and I have sisters in Downey, and they didn't have a grocery store anymore, and it just felt like this was the right place, the right time. I bought the building in spring of 21, spent from about the spring of 21 to about the spring of 22. Making plans, working with an architect, trying to find somebody who understood the importance of maintaining the history. A lot of people walk in the store and they say, wow, you've done a lot. Wouldn't it have been cheaper to tear it down and start over? And I say, yes, but that wasn't the point. If when you lose some of your history, you lose the architecture. When you lose the community memory, you lose a lot of the attraction of. Speaker1: Places without history. It's just a generic store.