Description

Before you even enter the museum, you experience a street scene with mural paintings on the hallway walls of old Amarillo buildings. Red awnings over display windows and the front door beckon you into the pharmacy, a ‘Main Street' establishment vital to community life. The display windows serve as cases for changing exhibits; usually these are selections from recent acquisitions, but there are also special exhibits recognizing donors, National Pharmacy Week, and historical topics showcasing artifacts from the Permanent Collection.

The first room is a restored pharmacy of the early 20th century. The furniture (open shelves, display cases, soda fountain, sales counter, and pharmacist's work station) was built in England in 1898 for a Baltimore pharmacy. The shelves and cases are stocked with the patent medicines, tobacco products, and general merchandise which customers relied upon to fill their medical and personal needs. An always-full candy jar provides a treat for the well-behaved patron of any age.

Turning right from the Pharmacy Room is the Tool Room. Its exhibits consist of the tools of trade, such as mortars and pestles, suppository molds, pill rollers, balances, bottles, prescription form filing systems, and a Prohibition Era still for making ‘legal' medicinal whiskey. The various pharmacy sidelines are represented as well, including a watch repair workbench, post office cage, Western Union service, veterinary supplies, and of course the soda fountain. A small bedroom recreates the early ‘emergency room,' where a patient stayed with the pharmacist until the frontier doctor returned to town.

Left from the Pharmacy Room is the Product Room. Case exhibits in here include herbals for teas, nasal delivery systems (atomizers and nebulizers), injectable products, and a 100-year range of products related to women. The latter may be the largest display of this type in the country. One cabinet exhibits the miniature tools and supplies of the frontier doctor, who road circuit around the region.

The fourth and final exhibit room is Pioneer Hall, where retired or deceased pharmacists who practiced in the state of Texas are honored with plaques giving their name, where he or she practiced, and when. Registered pharmacist certificates and diplomas from Texas and surrounding states hang on another wall.

Throughout the museum, examples of pharmacy art are prominently displayed. There are posters, prints, paintings, photographs, many colorful show globe. These are glass vessels filled with different colored liquids and represented the pharmacy of the past the way the barber pole did for its profession.

History

Billy Walker, a retired drug company representative and avid collector of pharmacy antiques and memorabilia, dreamed of creating a museum to house his extensive collection of old time pharmacy bottles, tools, and furnishings. But he couldn't find anyone interested in turning his dream into reality until he met with Dr. Arthur A. Nelson, Jr., Dean of the Texas Tech School of Pharmacy. The two men met in August, 1997, and spent the day discussing museum philosophy and digging through Billy's collection of pharmacy antiques.

Thanks to the dream of one man and the support of others, the Texas Pharmacy Museum is now a reality. Billy spent an entire year installing his collection and other donations into 3,000 square feet of exhibit space located in the Texas Tech School of Pharmacy building on the Amarillo campus. Opened to the public in October, 1998, it is the first of its kind in the state of Texas. It is also an integral part of the School of Pharmacy curriculum, serving as a museum/laboratory for the students, faculty, and staff and providing artifacts and resource material for the annual History of Pharmacy course.

Artifacts Collections

Artifacts and other items have been donated from # communities in Texas and from the states of California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. There have been 72 different donors; 69 have given permanent gifts, and three have made loans.

The total collection numbers approximately 10,000 items. Every item is inventoried, and cataloging in progress. The collection management system is computerized. Major classification categories include: art, balances, books, containers, drugstore items, furniture, laboratory glassware, medical items, mortars/pestles, show globes, and other pharmacy tools of the trade.

Research Collections

The artifact collections are available for reasearch, but at present this would be difficult. Cataloging is in progress and providing information about whart we have is inconveneient. However, we do have work space avaialble for researchers to use.

One resource that we are developing parallel with the collections is a library. It has two components: pharmacy history, and collection reference (e.g., bottles, drug store collectibles, etc.).