My grandfather Thomas Howard McKinney established a drugstore along with adjacent grocery store and upstairs theatre in 1917 located in Farmville, NC. He was a graduate of Lincoln University School of Pharmacy in Pennsylvania wanted to build a place where African - Americans could receive safe medicine, get fresh groceries and supplies; and have a place to socialize and see entertainment. African-Americans were often denied these things under the Jim Crow laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The buildings were owned and operated for many years by various members of my family. Sadly, they were demolished in the late 1990's after years of not being used. This blog post focuses on my search to learn more about my dad’s father and his contributions to the town of Farmville, NC.
McKinney Family Drugstore 1992
(Photo by Louise C. McKinney)
Growing up in Connecticut in the 1980s and 90s I was always hearing stories about the family drugstore and its contributions to the town of Farmville, NC. I remember the first time I saw it at the age of twelve. It had long ago been closed up and was no longer in use. My grandfather passed in 1958, long before I was born. My dad’s sister was using the grocery store side for her beauty salon. She took me and my mom into the drugstore side of the building. It was quite dusty, but the fixtures and furnishings were still intact. There were several round tables with marble tops and ice cream parlor style chairs to match. There were also a couple of smaller sized chairs and tables of the same design for little children to sit at and enjoy their desserts. The soda fountain was ornately carved with a large mirror behind it and several bar stools. I also remember seeing an elaborately styled gold-plated cash register at the end of the counter. Unfortunately, I only have photos of the outside of the building.
My grandfather was the town’s only trained black pharmacist at a time when most blacks were working at mills, or sharecroppers. He even managed to keep the business afloat during the Great Depression. I often wonder, even now, how he did it. He achieved much in a very difficult era between the post-Civil War and pre-Jim Crow south. Little is known about his life before Farmville. My dad (who is deceased now) said he lived in Ohio prior to North Carolina. He didn’t talk much about his past and back then my dad, being the baby of all his siblings, was too young to ask. As the years went by many family members moved way to start their own careers and lost interest in the past. My parents moved to Connecticut to continue their careers as educators (my mom as an elementary school teacher and my dad as a school administrator); and little by little my grandfather’s story became somewhat of a family mystery. Over the years my aunts, uncle, cousins, and now myself have tried to uncover his story without much luck. It seems that my grandmother knew about as much as we did about his life before their marriage. We seem to have hit the “genealogy wall” that many African- Americans often come up against.
Thomas Howard McKinney in 1954 (seen with 1924 Chevy Firetruck)
(Photo taken by Joe Melton in 1954 and later used in both Farmville Enterprise newspaper articles listed in sources below. The photo was submitted for the 2003 article by Maxine Edwards who was married to Mr. McKinney's grandson).
We do know that my grandfather was a volunteer fire fighter and electric linesman for the town, in addition to owning the pharmacy. He was a member of Station 2, and they had a 1924 Chevrolet truck with an 800-foot water hose. The segregated department consisted of twelve men, and they were all volunteers. Farmville maintained their unit much longer than other areas of North Carolina (including the Piedmont area). It was disbanded during desegregation.
Source List:
“The Good Old Days,” Farmville Enterprise, August 24, 1994.
“Looking Back on Farmville: The Last 100 Years,” Farmville Enterprise, September 2003.
McKinney, Louise C., Photograph of McKinney Family Drugstore. Farmville, NC, 1992.
Melton, Joe. Photograph of Thomas Howard McKinney. Farmville Enterprise, Farmville, NC, 1954.
Milligan, Chuck and Mike Legeros, “Early Black Firefighters of North Carolina, Annotated, Accessed October 2, 2010, and February 26, 2022. https://www.legeros.com/history/ebf/
Examples For Further Reading:
Baker, John. “The Search for My African-American Ancestry.” Historical Archaeology 31, no. 3 (1997): 7–17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25616544.
Dodson, Angela P. "Rooting through the past: Harvard professor helps people understand their roots through genealogy." Diverse Issues in Higher Education 29, no. 20 (2012): 14+. Gale In Context: Biography (accessed February 26, 2022). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A310149935/BIC?u=vic_liberty&sid=summon&xid=2ba40e52.
Gates, Henry Louis. Faces of America: How 12 Extraordinary People Discovered Their Pasts. New York: New York University Press, 2010.
Rainville, Lynn. “Protecting Our Shared Heritage in African-American Cemeteries.” Journal of Field Archaeology 34, no. 2 (2009): 196–206. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25608572
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