In a tiny town on a lonely stretch of Nevada highway, a glowing neon drugstore sign beckons as cars and loaded semi-trucks thunder past. You're among the few travelers who stop – maybe intrigued by the vintage soda fountain visible through the window. Then you see that the store, and everything in it, is almost exactly as it was on the day it closed – more than 4 decades ago.
As you pass beneath the restored Rexall sign and push open the door of the McGill Drugstore Museum, volunteer and caretaker Keith Gibson is there to greet you.
“It’s kinda like a trip back through time," he says. "Everything in here except me is from 1980…or before. Well, I could qualify there, too.”
The magazine rack – complete with vintage comics books – is to the right. A two-sided display of greeting cards is just in front of you, still stocked with happy birthdays and anniversary wishes. The soda fountain gleams on your left with vinyl-topped swivel stools. You catch your reflection in the mirror behind it and see the look of wonder on your face.
“It was a meeting place for the people in town," Gibson says. "The soda fountain here was kind of a place to come and gossip and have a Coke during the day and take a break. Us kids used to come in and read the comic books until Elsa would get after us – ‘They’re to be sold and bought, not read here!’ You know, Gerry the druggist was always kinda like a second doctor to us. They just took care of the town.”
Elsa and Gerry Culbert came to McGill, Nev., in the 1930s and bought the drugstore in 1945. The company town, built to house the workers at the Kennecott Copper smelter, was prospering.
“They took enough gold and silver out here, they said, to pay for the operation," Gibson says. "So the copper actually was pretty much free.”
While Gibson talks about the town and the smelter, which closed in the early 1980s, your eyes drift around the store. It’s fully stocked with old medicines, hair care products, Kodak cameras, band uniforms, school supplies, candy and tobacco – anything anyone could have needed.
“We have a camera collection here that goes back to original brownies and we have probably one of the biggest collections of flashbulbs," he says. "We have… dippity doo. Young people like to open it and the first thing they say is, ‘That smells like my grandmother.’”
The Culberts ran the store until shortly after Gerry’s death in 1979. And they saved everything.
“We have every prescription from 1920 to 1979,” Gibson says.
Behind the druggist counter in the back of the store, Gibson pulls a thick stack of papers off a shelf.
"These are the prescriptions," he says. "I found one for myself in December of 1935 – my first one.”
And he’s uncovering new things all the time.
“I found these pink prescriptions. These are prescriptions that they would get in prohibition," he explains. "So the doctor could write you a prescription for a bottle of whiskey. There’s thousands and thousands of documents. So I’m scanning all that.”
To date, Gibson has scanned about a quarter of the nearly 70,000 documents he estimates are in the store. His goal? To create a searchable archive for historians of the future, and pay lasting tribute to the town and the Culberts.
“Gerry and Elsa, before they died, said that they had a good life here and they loved the people and they wanted to leave something for them – because now that the copper smelter is gone, all we have here is our history," Gibson says. "That’s why I got so interested in preserving this place. If that’s our history, we’ve got to have it.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West in Montana, KUNC in Colorado, KUNM in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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