Solon O. Thachek, of Lawrence, able lawyer, judge and public man of Kansas, achieved a wider fame as one of the pioneers in the great work of promoting friendly relations with the republics of South America. He came of a distinguished English and Revolutionary ancestry and was born in Stenben County, New York, August 31, 1830. His father was a county judge. After graduating from Union College of Schenectady, New York, and from the Albany Law School, he married, and in 1858 located at Lawrence, where he became one of the proprietors of the Journal. He was a member of the Wyandotte constitutional convention; was appointed judge of the Fourth Judicial District in 1861; was a candidate for governor in opposition to the Lane faction of the republican party in 1864; and from that time until 1880 was engaged in the practice of law. He amassed a fortune; was several times regent of the State University; held the chair of equity jurisprudence in its law school, and in 1880 was elected to the State Senate. Two years later he was a candidate for governor against John P. St. John. Judge Thacher’s international mission in behalf of reciprocity is thus narrated. “At the close of his first term in the Senate he was appointed a member of a commission to visit the South American republics in the interests of reciprocity. He made a perilous voyage of over 34,000 miles, and being shipwrecked off the coast was taken to England, whence he returned to America. He met nearly every ruler in the southern continent, learned a great deal about the conditions existing there, and his report to Congress was so exhaustive that he was called before a special committee to explain his views on reciprocity.” On his return to Kansas he was again elected to the State Senate, of which he was a member for the remainder of his life. He was president of the State Historical Society at the time of his death in August, 1895.
