07/25/2008

By SYLVIA ANDERSON  / Associated Press

About 12 miles west of Interstate 29 in northwest Missouri, the road makes a downward slope toward what looks like a riverbend. It becomes the town of Forest City, a once prosperous community in the late 1800s, until the Missouri River changed course. Now, quiet railroad tracks run alongside farmland and a scattering of buildings, with little to remember the town's heyday — until now.

This year, 149 years after it was built, and several years after it was closed and left for dead, the Forest City drug store is making a comeback. A new lock on the door was just the beginning.

Ginger Book turns the key to the door of the long, narrow, brick building, originally called France's Drug Store. New brick siding on the front and white lace curtains over the two small windows make it hard for the casual passerby to know what's inside. The only identification on the building right now is an old Schlitz Malt Liquor sign dangling high above the door, left behind from the last days before the store was closed.

"It used to be right here," Book says, as she slides her hand along the wall inside the drug store to find the light switch.

With only dim rays of sunshine coming through the curtains, it's hard to see where the switch might be. For Book, it's a little fuzzy, too, because of the recent macular degeneration of her eyes. But as she points to dark cabinets along the wall, she doesn't need perfect vision to tell where the tin-lined drawers are that were used to store tobacco and cigars, or where the stairs used to be. The light switch was moved during some minor renovation work, but she knows where everything else is.

That's because she used to live here, many years ago.

It was her great-great-grandfather, John France, who originally built the drugstore in 1859. Her father, Glenn France, was the third generation to be a pharmacist here and he moved his family to an apartment upstairs in the 1930s when Book was in second grade. She lived here until she graduated from high school with her parents and brother (also named John and now a retired two-star general).

There is a slight musty smell when you first walk in the store, and the narrow planks of the wood flooring are worn from years of wear, but there is still evidence of the drug store's former grandeur.

Black and gold marble lines the baseboards all around the store. The marble looks like Italian portoro, although Book says they have not had an expert in to say for sure. The floor-to-ceiling apothecary cabinets look like mahogany and the back bar has inlays of stained glass in the doors.

As Book looks at the soda fountain, all in original and working condition, she breaks into a smile.

"I grew up behind that soda fountain," she says. "I started working here when I was tall enough to reach down to dip ice cream. One time I fell in and bit my tongue. Dad had to come get me and drag me out."

Saturday nights were busy, she says. The area across the street, now a gravel parking lot, would be full of horses and wagons under the trees. The store would stay open until midnight serving sodas, malts, sundaes and banana splits to customers sitting at the marble tables and bentwood chairs. Several of the tables and chairs are still here, and still with the gum someone placed on the undersides years ago.

"On Saturday nights, this was the place to come," Book says. "Everybody came to the drug store."

On May 24 of this year, France's Drug Store reopened as the Forest City Drug Store Museum. And it has become the place to come again. The cases that held candy, watches, dolls and school supplies now have a rotating display of antiques and memorabilia. In May, it was all kinds of things from the Forest City school, including band uniforms, photos and the old school bell. In July, it was changed to kitchen memorabilia, featuring all kinds of cookbooks and equipment not seen today, like a wooden cabbage cutter for making sauerkraut and a washboard and pail. New displays are planned every few weeks.

"We are so small that we don't want people to come and say, `I've seen it,'" says Billie Jo Ripley, publisher of the local newspaper, The Times Observer, and a member of the events committee which organizes the displays.

And just like in years past, guests can enjoy ice cream sundaes and shakes from the soda fountain, sitting at the same tables and chairs. The ice cream is not the highly anticipated Franklin Double X flavor of the month as proclaimed in an old banner across the door, which used to arrive on a train from Kansas City packed in dry ice. It comes in a truck now, usually from the Schwan's man, but the dollar cones and $2.50 sundaes, floats and malts taste good, and the price is right.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, it was standing room only, with lines waiting out the door for a look around and a chance to relive the experience of the soda fountain. The guest book was signed by 147 people in this town with a population of less than 300. And it's all been accomplished by donations from the community and volunteers who organized the Riverbend Extension Company, a non-profit group that is working to strengthen and re-establish the community.

"We wanted to call it the Forest City Extension Company after the company that started Forest City in 1857," says Peggy Ann Edwards, Forest City mayor. "But when we sent in the name, we found it was still on the books."

The group has many plans in the works for the drug store, including adding a historical library, a park next door with a memorial wall and renovating the apartment upstairs. It's been a boon to the community, Ripley says, but it almost didn't happen. Some people from Nebraska were planning to buy the building and sell everything inside.

"That's when the decision was made that we couldn't let that happen," she says. "It would have been just another old building to fall down in Forest City."