Did You Know?

The Old Drug Store

Food is always a great complement to a social gathering, and often it generates that gathering. Today the Huckleberry, the snack bar in the Moore Center adjacent to Lake Susan, provides that opportunity. But before the Huckleberry, before the Moore Center, there was the old drug store. Located with the post office, telephone exchange, and grocery store on Assembly Drive, directly across from the current post office, it remained open well into the evenings during the summer. Teen-agers took their Cokes and ice cream out to the rustic, much-beloved lean-to.

Adults came, too, following the evening conference session. Jane Holt, who moved to Montreat with her mother in 1945, soon got a job working in the drug store. She was usually the only employee in the evening, and remembers being inundated with “adults who were pillars of their churches – and who were in no mood to wait in line for me to dip out Biltmore ice cream, add milk and chocolate syrup and put the concoction in the milk shake machine, all while I cut cheese, inserted it between buttered bread, and put it in the grill – a kind of giant waffle iron whose top was so heavy it settled slowly down on two pieces of bread and cheese just like an overweight person on a soft mattress.”  She heard many mumbled comments about the flat cheese sandwiches and the long wait for service, punctuated by grumbling “about how bad feet hurt in spectator pump shoes when one had to stand in line after the very long walk from the auditorium. It’s a wonder she didn’t also hear comments about the “unruly” teens who had taken over the only seating.

Thanks to the Presbyterian Heritage Center, especially Nancy Midgette, for this glimpse from the past. Stop by the PHC for even more Montreat history and so much more.