Seeing a Century Over the Drugstore Counter

Remington Drug Company , in the Fauquier County town of the same name, started as a business 100 years ago and is the oldest of five independent pharmacies remaining in the Virginia Piedmont north of the Rapidan River.

Fifty years ago, there were about 25 -- and not a single chain pharmacy.

Sometime in 1908, 22-year-old William "Will" Walden Ashby began selling pharmaceuticals, then called notions, at Robert Lee Willis's grocery, dry goods and hardware store (now Grove Hardware) on Remington's Main Street. Five years later, Ashby opened a pharmacy across the street, in a new brick building that still houses the drugstore. The property had been deeded to him by his father-in-law, Edgar M. Rouse, a traveling drug salesman.

Remington was then nicknamed "Bustertown" because so many of its businesses went broke, a 1895 downtown fire being one reason. It was three blocks by four blocks and had 250 people, making it the largest town within a 10-mile radius. Its businesses served an immense agricultural belt that included southern Fauquier and the eastern part of Culpeper County.

In fall 1918, the region was ravaged by an influenza epidemic, and "Doc" Ashby -- the title "Doc" was common to all local pharmacists -- succumbed to the illness in October.

"People were dying like flies," his daughter, Willa "Billie" Rich, told me recently. She was in her mother's womb when her father died.

In April 1919, Ashby's widow sold the pharmacy to his younger brother Evan and to George Russell Cottingham, the town physician who had attended her husband. Evan Ashby, like his older brother, had received a correspondence course diploma in pharmacy from the Medical College of Virginia, now Virginia Commonwealth University. When Cottingham died in 1924, Ashby bought out his partner's interest in the store.

"Doc" Evan Ashby, known to the family as "Ikey," ran Remington Drug until 1972, turning it into one of the Piedmont's legendary establishments. In 1935, he acquired the 15-foot-long white mottled marble counter from which he and his clerks dispensed the ice cream, malted milks and sundaes that are still served today.

In fall 1944, Ashby learned that his sister's son-in-law had died in a shotgun accident in the Richardsville area, across the Rappahannock River from Remington. He told her to invite the victim's family to live in the apartment above the drugstore. So the four of them moved in -- two boys ages 5 and 2, their mother and their grandmother.

The older boy was Wilbur "Will" Heflin, the current owner and chief pharmacist of Remington Drug, and he immediately began helping out at the store.

"I started washing dishes standing on a Remington shotgun shell box," Heflin told me recently, recalling that the store sold guns and ammunition.

Of the tragedy that brought him and his brother to their great-uncle's store, Heflin mused, "You know, had that not happened, we'd probably be driving high-wheel pickups with shotguns on the back [window].