John Thomas Towers (1811–1857) was Superintendent of Printing at the U.S. Capitol and the sixteenth Mayor of Washington City, District of Columbia, from 1854 to 1856. Towers was born in Alexandria, D.C., in 1811 to parents who had recently arrived from Bingham, England. He was trained as a printer, joined the Columbia Typographical Society in 1834, and maintained several book and printing shops in Washington until 1852 when President Millard Fillmore appointed him superintendent of printing at the U.S. Capitol. (The position was the forerunner of the modern Government Printing Office.)