Once Tennessee's Oldest Drugstore, Bunting's Lives

Bunting’s was a drugstore – at one point, possibly the oldest operating in Tennessee – but its stature in Bristol had relatively little to do with drugs. No, it was all about the hot dogs.

Bunting’s was where you went for a 50-cent wiener and a Coke after a swim at the YMCA, scarfing down your grub over glass-top tables that showcased store merchandise. It was that rare community fixture that was at once landmark, youth hotspot and touristic must-see. It was a place that sold more hot dogs than medicinal drugs on a parade day, according to interviews with longtime patrons and current and former employees.

“Bunting’s had the best hot dog in town,” recalled Bristol native and candy magnate George Helms III, for whom the Bunting’s hot dog is a flavor of childhood. “I never will forget ’em,” Helms, 78, said in a recent interview.

Since its heyday as a marquee downtown hangout, Bunting’s has had a rough past quarter-century: squeezed out of its historic digs by a rent increase in the early 1980s and then bounced out of the old Bristol Memorial Hospital a decade later.

Bunting’s no longer serves hot dogs and has picked up and relocated to Virginia, where it shares a nameplate with another pharmacy in an inconspicuous shopping center on Euclid Avenue.

But after 140 years, Bunting’s still has a pulse. And when former owner Ron Palin steps into the Bunting’s and Northside Pharmacy, he detects the old drugstore’s soul in the corner, where one of the original glass-top tables is parked.

Hot dogs and critters

Bunting’s, its past and present owners said, launched in the wake of the Civil War in 1869.

A city directory from 1896 lists a “Bunting & Son” drugstore at 420 Main St. – which became State Street in the early 20th century. By this time, the business was already a local institution, as suggested by an ad that ran in 1903: J.H. Winston, a lawyer, was advertising his firm with no more specific address than “over Bunting’s Drug Store.”

By 1915, the store was touting its soda fountain as “one of the features of Bristol,” according to a business sketch published that year.

“All kinds of delicious summer and winter drinks are dispensed to perfection,” the sketch reads. “The store is a place of rendezvous with ladies when shopping and with residents and visitors generally.”
Jointly operated at the time by J.E. Long and J.W. Jones, the store also boasted standard medicines, toilet articles, perfumes, cigars and Eastman Kodak cameras.

But at some point during the 20th century, Bunting’s fell on hard times. Owner Cotton Jones built up such a debt with the Albers Drug Co. that the supplier ultimately took over the store, according to the owner who followed Jones.

“It was a mess, dirty,” said Palin, an Abingdon, Va., pharmacist who was hired by Albers to run the drugstore, and who eventually bought it.

But Bunting’s also had “neat features,” Palin said in the same breath: a fountain with a marble counter and 11 tables whose glass tops opened up to function as miniature showcases. In a recent interview, Palin, who is semi-retired, described the kinks and quirks of the old drugstore with groans and chuckles.

He recalled a sheet of paper tacked to a wooden post in the area where prescriptions were filled. It featured a tally adding up to 21, or 17, or thereabouts.

“What in the hell is this?” Palin recalled asking store employees. The response: “Oh, that’s the number of rats we’ve killed.”

“No lie,” Palin added during an interview.

Palin described one incident where a girl who worked behind the fountain – “nice, hyper” Maude Thompson – was surprised by a rat standing behind the hot dog box.

“It jumped from behind the box onto her stomach,” Palin said, laughing. “She squalled!”

Roaches were another problem. “We used to go down to the basement on Sundays and set off roach-killer bombs,” Palin said. “Then sweep them away with a broom. We cleaned up, and we were up and running.”

Though the rats and roaches were never completely exterminated, Palin said. “We got it down to where it wasn’t a problem.”

And yet, Bunting’s was known for its hot dogs.

A recipe for “Buntings Chili” calls for a half cup of bacon grease, a quarter pound of hamburger and a quart of water, with small doses of chili powder, salt and an unspecified quantity of flour. But the recipe lacks what Elvira Marshall, a former cook and waitress at Bunting’s, called the secret ingredient.

“What made them stand out was the dehydrated onions,” said Marshall, who started at Bunting’s in 1973 and now works in its latest incarnation as a pharmacy technician.

The end of a good thing

By the early 1980s, when a bank sought to buy and demolish the building that housed Bunting’s, the drugstore had a strong following that rallied to its defense. The building, which also had been home to a medical practice and a newsstand, was owned by a dozen or so businessmen who were partners in a local corporation known as “Park and Shop.” Saving Bunting’s became the first cause célèbre of the nascent Bristol Historical Association – a local organization that seeks to preserve historic buildings.

“The floor in it was a mosaic design worth thousands of dollars,” Joyce Kistner, then president of the association, said. “We just had no encouragement at all that we could save the building. [The owners] wanted to sell it.”

The public opposition stopped them – momentarily.

“The bank finally backed off,” Palin said. But Palin did not have a lease, and he said his landlords raised the rent from $600 to $1,000 a month – an increase he knew he couldn’t absorb. So Bunting’s left.
The property was sold to Rite Aid, according to Palin, Kistner and city officials.

“There was so much brouhaha that they tore down the building in the middle of the night,” Palin said.

Kistner, interviewed separately, gave a similar account. “They demolished it at night when no one was there,” she said. “People just drove by and it was on the ground. It’s just a shame that, that building didn’t make it.”

The site lay dormant for a time before Rite Aid built a pharmacy there in 1984, according to the Bristol Tennessee Community Development office.

The Rite Aid itself didn’t last. The law firm Hale, Lyle & Russell bought the Rite Aid building, along with an adjacent parking lot, in early December for $767,500.

Newly homeless, Palin moved Bunting’s into the now-defunct Bristol Memorial Hospital, and sold the operation to John Vandeventer in 1987.

“It was a classic,” Vandeventer said recently. He knew of Bunting’s from his undergraduate days at King College, though he never tasted the hot dogs himself.

Vandeventer kept Palin on the payroll while Bunting’s was at the hospital. But when the hospital closed around 1993, and Palin balked at the idea of keeping the pharmacy open for 24 hours a day at a different hospital, Vandeventer merged Bunting’s with the Northside Pharmacy he founded in 1982.

“And now the oldest drugstore in Tennessee is in Virginia,” he said.

The old soul

Whether Bunting’s really was the oldest drug store operating in Tennessee, before it crossed the state line, is difficult to nail down. The Tennessee Historical Society does not track old businesses, its executive director said. And though Bunting’s pops up on a database kept by the Tennessee Department of Health, the screen indicates only that the records have been purged. A secretary at the Tennessee Board of Pharmacy said any paper file would have been destroyed by 1993.

Palin said he fielded many a question from Tennessee pharmacy board inspectors about whether Bunting’s was the state’s oldest, and that one inspector told him it was.

Newspapers, including The New York Times, have called Bunting’s the state’s oldest drug store.

“If you time your visit [to Bristol] around lunch, I recommend you run across the street into Tennessee to Bunting’s Drug Store,” wrote Hugh O. Muir in the June 1, 1980, edition of the Times, in a travel piece on Southwest Virginia. Muir, a radio correspondent for Voice of America and a writer, described Bunting’s as “the state’s oldest” and reported its founding year as 1869.

But Vandeventer’s Bunting’s doesn’t flaunt its age. There are a few old black-and-white photographs of the store from its downtown location, and one of original glass-top tables in the corner, showcasing old bottles of Castor Oil and Watkins Fragrant Pomade and turpentine.

Bunting’s soul, if you ask Vandeventer, has transmigrated into its customers.

“No matter where we’ve ended up, [the customers] have stayed with us,” he said.

So it is with Ron and Lilly Cox, of Mendota, Va., who have been customers for more than 20 years.

Ron Cox, a 57-year-old disabled truck driver, traces his loyalty to 1985, after he threw out his back.

“The people – they care about you,” he said, singling out Marshall. “We’ve kind of grown up together.”

Not that he doesn’t long for the old Bunting’s.

“I hate to see the building torn down,” he said. “The hot dogs with chili were the best.”

Well, what about the hot dogs? a reporter asked Vandeventer.

“We have been asked,” the pharmacist said. “It’s just in this day and age, fast food in pharmacies has fallen by the wayside. I’ve always been told it was a loser,” he said.

dgilbert@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2558

Buntings Chili Recipe

KEY DATES
Early years

1869: Widely believed to be the founding date of Bunting’s Drug Store.
1896: First published reference of Bunting’s found by the Herald Courier.
1903: A lawyer advertises his firm as being “over Bunting’s Drug Store.”
1915: A published sketch of Bunting’s touts the drugstore as “one of the features of Bristol.”

Modern

1970s: Bunting’s is taken over by a drug company to whom it owed money; a local manager buys it back.
1980: A story in the New York Times calls Bunting’s the oldest drugstore in Tennessee.
1983-84: Bunting’s holds off a bank’s attempt to purchase and demolish its building, but leaves its historic home after a rent increase.
1993-94: Bunting’s is bounced out of the Bristol Memorial Hospital when the facility closes; relocates to Virginia and merges with Northside Pharmacy.