Today’s pharmacies just don’t have the same feel as those “drug stores” from days gone by. Nowadays, it’s all business, filling prescriptions and answering questions at a special window marked “consultation.”
That’s not all bad, by the way. We can thank a fellow originally from New Bern who moved to Oxford back in 1884 for standardizing the drug industry.
Local historian Mark Pace called Franklin Wills Hancock “the father of pharmacies in North Carolina.”
Hancock started at drug store in Oxford and enjoyed a 68-year career. When he died at age 92, he was the oldest licensed pharmacist in the country. His almost seven decades was the longest tenure as a druggist.
In fact, he was the first licensed druggist, Pace said.
Before licensing was required, there was little standardization among drug stores, apothecaries and other establishments.
Henderson is home to two independent pharmacies – Mast Drug and Medical Arts Pharmacy, and both have been around for decades. Bill Mast started Mast Drug in 1962 and Chocky White started Medical Arts in 1971. Their presence in the community has not faded, despite the existence of larger chain stores.
If you’ve lived in the area long enough, you remember Parker’s, Page’s and Woolard’s. Even the Florida-based chain store Eckerd’s had a front-row seat at the Henderson Mall, complete with a lunch counter and grill in its heyday.
In Granville County, there was Puckett’s up in Stovall that was in business from 1934-1984 and Jones Drug in downtown Oxford. Charlie Jones returned to his hometown and ran his drug store from 1955 to 2009. He continued working part-time well into his 90s at one of the chain stores in Oxford.
The best information Pace can find notes that John G. Hall opened the first drug store in Oxford in 1879. When it closed in 2000, it could claim being in operation over three centuries – the 19th, 20th and 21st, Pace said.
It opened just more than a decade after the Civil War ended, when folks used home remedies concocted from roots and bark and other materials found in nature.
“In the early days of drug stores and pharmacies, basically they were winging it,” Pace said. “They had their own cures, their own method of doing things.”
And many of those early pharmacists touted patented medicines, including Owen Davis, a Henderson pharmacist who formulated “Atlas Celery Phosphate Vitalizer” at Atlas Medicine Company in town.
At 50 cents a bottle, it claimed to cure everything from “general debility” to virility problems.
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