Vanishing Minneapolis: The End of Burch Pharmacy

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THE BURCH PHARMACY STORY starts with two pharmacist-businessmen named George, each of whom opened pharmacies  in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis in the decade before World War I.

It took two decades, but eventually the two pharmacies they started—the Ball Pharmacy and the Burch Pharmacy—became one.

The story of Burch Pharmacy is in part a mirror of social history, reflecting shifts in culture, commerce, and drugstore practices. Closing in April 2010 after 97 years in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Burch Pharmacy was one of the last links to the bustling streetscapes of early- to mid-20th-century city life—the era of humming streetcars and human-scale neighborhoods, with an almost mind-boggling mosaic of drugstores, grocers, and other small shops lining avenues across the Twin Cities.

A telling factoid: The 1948 Minneapolis City Directory listed 215 drugstores across the city, all but a handful independently owned. In 2010, exactly one of those remained: Burch Pharmacy.

The Burch Story is also, as it happens, a good biopic, with a few singular and even juicy twists in the Burch back story. Among them: the spectacular triumph of an ingenious striver, the lively duels of drug-fiend burglars and pistol-packing pharmacists, one catastrophic olive oil fire, one fatal holdup, and the tragic end of the scion of a prominent Midwestern family.

The Beginning: George A. Ball

The tale begins with George A. Ball (1872-1932), a striver and innovator who parlayed a pharmacy career into tremendous business success—and who also twice cleared the way for a competitor named George Burch.

In 1894, the 22-year-old Ball, of St. Paul, passed the Minnesota State Board of Pharmacy exam to become a pharmacist (having a year earlier sailed through the assistant pharmacist exam). After working as a prescription clerk at the Opera House Drug Co. at Sixth & Hennepin, Ball rustled up $20,000 capital to incorporate his own business, Ball Drug, in 1898. It’s unclear what he did for the next few years, but by 1907, he was the owner of Ball’s Drug Store in a brand-new brick building at 2200 South Dupont (aka 2200 Hennepin).

The building was erected in August 1906 by the R. G. Winter jewelry company, which shared storefront space with Ball’s Drug along with the Dupont Grocery and Meat Company that was owned by C.A. Kallestad. Interestingly, the building was designed by Minneapolis architects Boehme & Cordella, who went on a year later to design the Swedish Institute in Minneapolis (originally the Swan Turbblad residence).

Ball’s Drug lasted just a little over four years at 2200 Hennepin. In January 1912, his business and Kallestad’s market were consumed by a ferocious fire that began when a can of denatured alcohol exploded in the drugstore, “igniting a considerable quantity of olive oil,” according to an account in the Minneapolis Tribune.

Ball placed his loss at $23,000, with only $17,000 covered by insurance. But he lost no time regrouping. The very next day, Ball ran an ad in the paper announcing that “The Ball Pharmacy” would henceforth serve patrons from new digs at Franklin and Hennepin Ave., home of the Franklin Pharmacy Co. which, the ad stated, “we also own.”

The Ball Pharmacy at 1942 Hennepin

The new Ball Pharmacy occupied the southwest ground floor of a 1910 building on the corner of Franklin and Hennepin (for more on the architectural back story, see sidebar below). It had a much smaller footprint than the later Burch Pharmacy, which over the years came to stretch across three adjoining buildings from (legally described as 1936-1942 Hennepin).

Next door to the new Ball Pharmacy, at 1936 Hennepin (in recent decades the middle room of the Burch Pharmacy) was the aforementioned Holman-Gerdes grocery store. At 1934 Hennepin (the longstanding Burch card shop and for many years, a neighborhood post office) was the Lowry Hill Fruit Company (which may have been more healthful than its ads, which ran to five-pound cans of locally made McKusick’s hard candy, “so delicate and true they seem like nature’s own”).

Upstairs was an elegant venue well-known at the time, Mrs. Noble’s Dancing Studio. There, Mrs. Helen S. Noble presided over dancing lessons, lavishly decorated afternoon bridge parties, and fancy soirees attended by the city’s smart set.

Noble had started out in the mid-1890s hosting dance classes and parties geared to University of Minnesota students and faculty at 315 14th Avenue S.E., the site of the current Kitty Cat Club in Dinkytown. Before moving to 1942 Hennepin, her studio had been at 1217 Hennepin for several years.

As Ball settled into his new space downstairs from Mrs. Noble, he may have felt terrific satisfaction at having so quickly risen from the ashes of fire. But it was clear that he couldn’t catch a break from vandals and thieves. Burglars repeatedly smashed his store windows and wrecked his locks to scoop up fountain pens, cigars, toilet articles, and other merchandise—in one case  setting him back $1,000, according to news reports.

“It is believed that the burglars were drug fiends in search of dope,” observed the Northwestern Druggist in fall 1915 recounting one of many burglaries at the Ball Pharmacy. To make matters worse (as the same publication observed a couple of months later), thieves routinely made off with Ball’s shiny delivery bicycles “as fast as he can have them delivered” (“notwithstanding the fact that his pharmacy is surrounded by electric lights”).

Still, Ball seems to have taken it all in stride. He bought new bicycles in lots of half a dozen, and he regularly advertised his store in large newspaper ads touting the benefits of 35-cent Durham-Duplex razors and a wide variety of potions and antidotes for everything from baldness to kidney disease.

Soda fountains were only beginning to be fixtures in pharmacies, but corner drugstores were fast becoming an essential stable of neighborhood life—the place to stop in for headache pills, plasters for colds, tooth powder, cigars, boxes of chocolates, shaving brushes, and other sundries.

Like other pharmacies in the early 20th century, Ball’s was a “compounding” pharmacy where—there being yet no tablets or capsules engineered by Pfizer or GlaxoSmithKline —druggists made their own pills, powders, elixirs, and tinctures from plant extracts and other ingredients.

Remedies ruled, many of them “patent” or proprietary concoctions developed by pharmacists and, often, doctors living over the drugstores. Ads Burch ran with other local pharmacies highlighted the wonders of Dr. French’s quinsy tonsillitis cures; a “vibrator” ideal for everything from asthma to the intriguing sounding “locomotor ataxia”; and a “nerve vitalizer” called Kellogg’s Santone Wafers.

Other ads touted a product called FAMO promised “to make women’s hair grow luxuriously”; a potion called Proton that was guaranteed—in the pre-supermodel era—to “make you pleasingly plump”; and Vinol, a product said to invigorate “fagged-out women” and “tired working men.”

More optimistically yet for a Minnesota shopkeeper, Ball equipped his drugstore “with the Gillespie Flyless Entrance and expects to have a store absolutely free from flies.”

Fatal Concoction

Whether he had any success at all in vanquishing flies from his store is unknown, but his resolute optimism couldn’t spare George Ball the scandal of a high-profile—and lethal—mistake.

In October 1920, a Hennepin County judge named J.H. Steele, 64, dropped dead after ingesting a poisonous hair removal compound he’d presumed to be salts prescribed by his doctor to prepare for x-ray examinations.

The compound came from, you guessed it, the Ball Pharmacy. The judge, a pal of Ball’s who lived nearby (1930 Girard), had presented the pharmacy with a scribbled and pocket-worn note that was misread by Ernest Baldwin, a clerk at the Ball Pharmacy.

Instead of the barium sulfate prescribed by Steele’s doctor, Baldwin asked Ball to hand him a bottle of barium sulfite for the judge—referring to a nonprescription but highly poisonous compound for external use only.

The fatal consequences earned Ball a grilling by the superintendent of police and netted his pharmacy unwanted front-page publicity. Although the death was accepted as an accident, Ball’s embarrassment must have been acute as across the city flags were lowered to half mast in Steele’s memory—and as hundreds lined up for the funeral (at the nearby Scottish Rite cathedral, Dupont and Hennepin) for “the best loved man who ever sat upon the Hennepin County bench,” as the Minneapolis Morning Tribune put it.

But not even scandal could keep the ambitious Mr. Ball down for long.

The Ever Ambitious Mr. Ball

Ball was from all available evidence showing a knack for getting ahead. He held leadership roles in the Minnesota State Pharmaceutical Association and in 1913 was on the organization committee for the Minneapolis branch of the National Cooperative Drug Company, a St. Louis-based wholesaler owned and operated by retail druggists.

In what has the faint whiff of a coup, that company was soon succeeded by a Minneapolis-based concern called the Northwestern Drug Company—with Ball as one of the founding directors.

“One of the livest wires in drug circles in the state,” was the description applied to Ball in a 1918 North Western druggist article about the company.

In 1917, Ball and his spouse, Inez. had moved into a newly built house at 5052 Vincent Avenue S. in Minneapolis. In 1921, Ball became the prime mover in a company spinoff called the Northwestern Ice Cream Company, formed to economically manufacture and sell ice cream for drugstore soda fountains. This evidently was an answer to complaints from drugstores across the region that they were gouged by the prices charged by regular ice cream manufacturers.

“Mr. Ball is the active man in the organization and has shouldered all the details of the promotion work and will be managing charge of the plant as soon as it is completed,” breathlessly (missing commas and all) reported a publication called The Soda Fountain.

New Chapters for Ball’s Pharmacy

Thus ended Ball’s days as a retail pharmacist. In December 1922, his business success and wealth soaring, Ball, then age 44, sold his eponymous pharmacy to one Judson M. Dix,  55, and his 30ish son Paul B. Dix.

Even so, the burglarizing drug fiends who had plagued Ball couldn’t resist seeing him off with a farewell heist:

“Just prior to the sale of his pharmacy at 1942 Hennepin Avenue, George A. Ball, the proprietor, was held up and robbed by bandits as he was proceeding to a garage preparatory to motoring home,” reported the Northwestern Druggist.

The Dix pere and fils had recently owned a pharmacy at 31st and Nicollet; before that, Judson Dix, of 2548 Aldrich Ave., had been a pharmacist at one of the Gamble & Ludwig pharmacies, at 901 Hennepin downtown.

The Ball Pharmacy was rebranded as the Dix Pharmacy, which it remained for roughly eight years. The building itself, meanwhile, had in 1920 been subleased by owner J.D. Ekstrum (a Twin Cities flour baron)—for reasons not altogether clear—to William Hamm, the prominent St. Paul businessman and son of the founder of Hamm’s Brewing Company

The business acquisition by Dix would be the last change of ownership before the pharmacy at 1942 Hennepin became the Burch Pharmacy. Some accounts have suggested, erroneously, that a drugstore called “Pereson Bros.” was in the space for a time—misinformation probably fueled by a Minnesota Historical Society photo labeled “Pereson Bros. Drugstore interior, Franklin and Hennepin, Minneapolis.”

Just to set the record straight: Burch Pharmacy was never Pereson Bros. Dusty record books in the basement of Burch Pharmacy confirmed that the line of succession at 1942 Hennepin went directly from Ball to Dix to Burch. The Pereson Bros. Pharmacy actually was across the street, in a two-story stone-and-frame structure at 2000 Hennepin known as the Baxter Building (razed in 1960 for the Scottish Rite Temple).

The drugstore at 2000 Hennepin predated the pharmacy at 1942 Hennepin by at least a decade. It was the Frank Yost Pharmacy in January 1902, the Larabee Pharmacy by Mary 1904, and the L.T. Lincoln Pharmacy around 1910. It subsequently was owned by Marvin Jones (also owners of a pharmacy at 35th & Chicago), before being acquired, in 1925, by Hans C. Pereson and his brother (who also owned a pharmacy at 1229 Nicollet Avenue).

Pharmacies bloomed across Minneapolis between 1920 and 1920. In 1913, a year after the Ball Pharmacy set up shop at Franklin and Hennepin, directories listed six drugstores on Hennepin in the ten blocks between Franklin and Lake Street: Ball’s (1942), L.T. Lincoln (2000) Burch (2200), Griffen’s (2547), C.H. McCoy (2329), and Washburn (3001).

By 1922, two of those had changed hands (Ball had become Dix, McCoy had become Broude Bros.) and at least five more had opened: Orman Bros. (2755), Jeter & Thill (2918), R.S. Heck and Anderson & Ranfranz (both at Hennepin and Lake), and F.O. DeWits (just past Lake Street at 3049).

The Dix Pharmacy would soon be history. In December 1930, the history of the store begun by George Ball merged with that of the store begun by George Burch—although only one of the two Georges would live to see it happen.

The Rest of the Story: George S. Burch: Continue reading on next page»