End of an era: Fulghum-Carr, Warrenton's drug store, goes out of business

From Facebook: Linda Fulghum Bruggemann
 (with Molly Bloodworth) and Emile Carr
at the closing of Fulghum-Carr. 

Saw on the Facebook feed of dear family friend Linda Fulghum Bruggemann about the closing of the doors of Fulghum-Carr Drug Co., known to so many of us as just "the drug store," one of Warrenton's longest-surviving Main Street businesses, after 65 years.

There's so much that could be said here. I could tell you how I wish that despite all the conveniences of the modern world, that we could just stop time for small towns and let them, and the small businesses that drive them, just stay the way they are, like prehistoric insects frozen in amber.

Or I could tell you that the thing I always remembered and loved the most about Fulghum-Carr when I was a kid was, maybe strangely, the old wooden floor and the smell -- I don't know what it was, but it smelled like a drugstore on Main Street in a small town in the deep South should smell. It was comforting. You're not ever going to get that smell in a CVS.

And the toy aisle. Fulghum-Carr always had the best toys. Somewhere at my father's house is probably still the Little Builder tool set that were the first tools I ever owned and which I used to disassemble various objects in the house, to my mother's great annoyance.

And Theodore, my beloved childhood teddy bear. He was in the window at Fulghum-Carr when my mother took me in one day, and it was love at first sight. Santa put him under the Christmas tree for me. (He's still around and is sitting on a shelf in my bedroom here in Atlanta right now.)

But it's really hard to operate a small business in a small town, in a world dominated by Wal-Mart and Walgreens. And the most important thing to be said is to be glad that we had it around for so long.