INDEPENDENCE, KAN. ? A home once owned by former Kansas governor and failed presidential candidate Alf Landon will be moved today as efforts begin to make it into a museum and political research center.

The three-story Victorian home that sits at a busy intersection in this southeast Kansas town was slated for demolition about six months ago to make way for a Walgreens.

Walgreens officials were not aware of the historical significance of the site and later decided to save the home, which was built in 1901. They donated $102,000 to the Independence Historic Preservation and Resource Commission to help buy the mansion and move it, commission chairman Norman Chambers said.

The house was recently lifted from its foundation and will be moved a few blocks away. After the move, local and state officials will begin raising money to restore and renovate it, Chambers said.

The plan is to turn it into a center and museum on early 20th century politics and the Landon family.

Chambers is hopeful that fund raising will be completed within the next 18 months. The house will be owned and operated by the Independence Historical Museum Inc.

The family owned the house in Independence from 1904 to about 1937. John Landon bought the home for his newly married son, Alf, who lived there until being elected Kansas governor in 1932.

After the election, Landon built a house in Topeka and moved there. It was there that Landon and his wife, Theo, raised their family while entertaining presidents and national celebrities. Nancy Kassebaum Baker, his daughter, was the first woman senator from Kansas, serving from 1978 to 1996.

The two-term governor was a revered Republican elder statesman until his death in 1987. A month before he died, Landon sat on the front porch of his Topeka home and had a piece of birthday cake with Ronald Reagan.

Landon ran against incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 and used the Independence home on the cover of a flier urging voters to “Know Landon as his neighbors know him.”

Landon lost to Roosevelt in what was then the biggest political landslide ever.

In 1998, David Wittig, then chief executive of Western Resources, bought and remodeled the home that sits on 13 tree-filled acres in northwest Topeka.