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Thayer is a village in southern Sangamon County, Illinois, and it is part of the Springfield Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Thayer was a latecomer to the central Illinois coal boom, beginning in 1900 when the Chicago, Wilmington & Vermilion Coal Company bought mining lands in southern Sangamon County.

Mine superintendent Ruffin D. Fletcherson platted the town of Thayer, supervised construction of the mines, and built 86 homes that miners could own, along with a 26-room hotel and a large store building.

The Thayer mine was producing 250 tons of coal a day by January 1901 and reached a daily capacity of 2,000 tons by December of that year, but the coal played out and the mine closed in 1914.

Thayer's post office opened in 1902, two years after the town was founded.

The old Illinois Route 4 through Thayer carried the original alignment of Route 66 from 1926 to 1930.

Thayer was the boyhood home of Byron "Monty" Bolton, a member of the Barker-Karpis gang, whose home was searched during an FBI investigation in the gangster era of the 1930s.

Thayer had 632 residents at the 2020 census, down from 693 in 2010 and far below its coal-era peak of 1,254 people in 1920.

The village had 283 households at the 2010 census, within a total area of just 0.61 square miles, all of it land.

Thayer sits on Illinois Route 4 about 4.5 miles south of Auburn, in a corridor of small villages that still reflect their coal-mining roots.