McGill Drugstore Preserves Memories Of Bygone Era

No one has yet invented a time machine. So for now, one of your best options for a time-travel experience is found in the tiny eastern Nevada town of McGill. There lies the McGill Drugstore Museum, which exists in a kind of suspended animation.  The drugstore on main street in this former mining town exists exactly as it stood in 1979, when it closed to regular business after serving the town since the 1920s. Visitors will find the shelves filled with products not seen in three decades. From first-aid supplies to greeting cards and boxes of camera film, everything exists as it was during the heyday of a prior generation. Even the original ice cream counter and vintage Coca-Cola fountain stand ready to dish out refreshments.  

“You walk in here and it is literally like walking into a time capsule. That’s why it’s so important,” said Sue Ann Manning, a volunteer docent at the drugstore. “Everything that was here in 1988 is just like it was.”  In a small town like McGill, everyone crossed paths at the drugstore. Whether to pick up a prescription or an ice cream cone, neighbors traded news and gossip within these walls while going about their daily lives. You can feel that energy when you walk the aisles at the museum today.  

This is especially so because McGill was a company town. For more than 70 years, it was home to a giant smelter that processed copper ore from the Robinson Mine west of Ely. The Kennecott Copper Co. built much of the town to house employees who worked at the smelter. The ore arrived by the trainload to be unloaded and refined by the people of McGill.

McGill once had a population of more than 3,000 people, served by a movie theater, several taverns and restaurants — and the drugstore. A slow decline began before the smelter closed in 1983, and today the town has only about a thousand residents. Most now travel the 12 miles to Ely for their pharmaceutical needs. But the McGill Drugstore houses all their memories of a thriving industrial town.  “We have people that grew up in McGill come there, and they are just in awe when they go through it,” said Manning, who has lived in McGill since the 1970s. “One visitor saw a photo of herself in the drugstore — in her school band uniform. It almost brought that family to tears. People come down there and they’re just in awe over the memories. There’s not a time I go down there that I don’t learn something.”   

The drugstore was operated as a family business by Gerald and Elsa Culbert from the mid-1950s. The pharmacy closed in 1979 when Gerald died, and Elsa kept the remainder of the store open sporadically until about 1988. Then in 1995, the family gave the store to the White Pine Public Museum, based in Ely, along with all its inventory at the time. They left everything in the store just as it was in its final days, and a succession of stewards has done the same.  For many years, lifelong McGill resident Dan Braddock oversaw the drugstore and opened it for private tours on request. It was listed in 1998 on the National Register of Historic Places.

“That’s how we get people from all over the world in here,” said Keith Gibson, a lifelong McGill resident and a volunteer docent at the drugstore. “I’ve had people from Italy here. They loved it. Everybody does. It’s unique.”  In 2018, the White Pine Public Museum assembled a corps of volunteer docents to operate the museum, and it is now open to drop-in visitors every Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.  The drugstore is at 11 Fourth St. (Highway 93), in McGill. It is free to visit, but the museum appreciates donations to support the all-volunteer operation.

“Most museum people take things in to be shown. But this is a museum that has history in it,” said Manning. “There are treasures here. We don’t move things around, but we dust and clean. That is it.”

For more information:

McGill Drugstore Museum:

https://wpmuseum.org/mcgill-drugstore-museum/

http://www.mcgilldrugstoremuseum.org/

775-235-7082