Tag Archives: Tennessee”

Holston Pharmacy/DeWitt’s

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Well, 200 years from 1776 to 1976. Health above all! By using DeWitt nostrums, of course.
Anyway, Holston Pharmacy opened its Boone Street location in November, 1926, in the Bandy-Price Building (now Two Dad’s Restaurant) at Five Points (that’s now considered an old designation. It’s the intersection of Charlemont, Boone, East and West Sullivan and Cherokee Streets). The location was advertised as having a bright, all-glass store front with entrances facing Five Points, Sullivan and Charlemont. The owner/operator was Pharmacist W.D. Westmoreland. Holston Pharmacy then had locations on Broad Street, on the Bristol Highway and in Surgoinsville. I saw that at one time later on, the Pharmacy had a sales event featuring a special price on razor blades for Gillette razors…with a free styptic pencil. And, if you ever shaved with a Gillette razor, you darn sure needed a styptic pencil!
(note: a styptic pencil was a pencil-shaped stick of aluminum salts…it helped clot the blood when you nicked yourself with that terrible razor) (and you would…)

Upper Gregg Cemetery

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In 2005, after a year or so recording the old foundations of homes and the old school at Bays Mountain Park,  Following a rather difficult path that I had picked out using a calibration between an old plat map and a modern topo map of the park, I located the Upper Gregg (or Gragg) Cemetery.  There are two readable stones here, the rest have eroded to blanks.
uppergreggstone1

On this one is carved, “John M. Brown Born Mar. 23, 1820. Died Sep. 21, 1880. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God”.
In Muriel Millar Clark Spoden’s self-published pamphlet “The Early Years on BAYS MOUNTAIN in Sullivan County, Tennessee” (1975, Franklin Printing), she records comments by a elderly descendant of the Gregg family commenting on the incongruity of having a Brown in the Gregg Cemetery.  “…how did he come in on this?”

There’s another stone with readable letters on it:

uppergreggstone2

J. M. B.  That’s it.
The cemetery is on a hillside overlooking the lake.  The graves face east, to the rising sun.
I have pictures of the lower cemetery.  I’ll post them later, but all the stones there were blank.