The Felt Block, built in 1880 in Seneca by resident Andrew Felt, later lieutenant governor of Kansas, is a restored urbane Italianate building with cast iron fronts, applied columns, and window caps made at a Seneca foundry, and a central entrance with a triangular pediment and stairs leading to second-floor offices. As Seneca prospered, brick, stone, and iron became the preferred building materials, replacing the hastily built false-front structures that had characterized the town's early Main Street, especially after the Great Chicago Fire of 1870 led many prairie towns to discourage wooden downtown buildings. The building first housed a grocery store and the offices and presses of the Seneca Tribune, established by Felt, and after 1919 it housed dry goods businesses, the last of which was Strathman's Variety, a store serving Seneca's fashion-conscious shoppers until it closed in the 1960s as chains such as J.C. Penney drew business with catalog items from Chicago and New York.