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Rene deMontluzm Sr., Mississippi?s oldest active registered pharmacist, and his son Rene Jr., present proprietor of the Bay St. Louis deMontluzin Pharmacy that is the oldest drug store on tha Mississippi Gulf Coast, read a prescription just brought in to fill.
THE deMONTLUZIN STORY
Coast's Oldest Drug Store And Registered Pharmacist
The picturesque and historic drugstore at 121 South Beach Boulevard in Bay St. L o u i s dates back 80 years under the continuous operation of three generations of deMontluzins ? but the intriguing story itself goes back 103 years when its founder set sail with his family from the province of Lorraine in Prance and came to America.
This original L. A. deMontluzin, the father of now 92 year-old Rene deMontluzin Sr.. who still can be found a part of each day behind the counter, and the grandfather of Rene deMontluzin Jr., t h e present active proprietor, was a scholar who had graduated at the early age of sixteen from the University of France. When he embarked with his household to America in search of a happier and healthier mental climate far from the troubled times of France torn with the War in the Crimea, be was a well known teacher, writer and- journalist.
It was in 1855 when he landed after two months at sea in New Orleans. But times were troubied here, too. The entire nation was a slow burning fuse about to explode into the War Between the States. So it was only for a short few years that he established his home at Convent, La., taught at Jefferson College and later started his own school for boys before the call to colors emptied his classrooms.
FOUNDED SCHOOL ?
After the war deMontluzin moved his family to New Orleans where he founded another private boys school which appears in New Orleans history as the Classical and Commercial School at 123 Conti St.
In 1874, twenty years having taken their toll since he left his native France, his doctors insisted that he retire from teaching and find a quiet country place to live. That was when he moved his family for the last time to Bay St. Luuis, where he fell in love with its soothing salt air and. restful surroundings.
Four years later, his active mind seeking an outlet, he bought the entire contents of a small apothecary, shop on the beach, intending then to use it mainly to develop hjs hobby of chemistry. But the community?s need for medicines and the expert skill of a pharmacist caused him, to expand his
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scientific knowledge into a service to the community and gradually, aimost imperceptibly he found himself the proprietor of what is still the oldest drugstore on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Three times the location was changed over the years ? first to Main street where the Hancock Insurance Agency is located today and then a few years later back to the beach again, just east of the present site. When that building was burned in the fire in 1897 that destroyed half the business section of Bay St. Louis, the present store was built on the preseni, site a year later. And Lhv; founder of this pharmacy continued on in the healthful atmosphere of the Bay and lived until 1908 to see two of his sons become pharmacists and a third serve his fellow man as a doctor.
ALERT AT 92
One of those three sons is still alive ? the alert 92-year-old Rene Sr., the oldest still active registered pharmacist in Mississippi who has, however, now turned the management and operation of the drugstore over to his son Rene Jr.
Rene Sr. was eight years old when he came with his father to Bay St. Louis, worked in the drugstore since he was thirteen and in 1893 obtained his Mississippi license as a registered pharmacist. He has watched Bay St. Louis grow and thrive and has met many of the celebrities who came there in his time including the Indian Chief Qeronimo, Yankee General Grant, ar.d World?s Champion John L. Sullivan. Once in his youth he was placed in charge of the famed pilot Samuel Clemens (whom literature knows as Mark Twain) on a steamboat trip from New Orleans to an upriver plantation.
He saw drugstore science develop from rhubarb and soda and asafetida to the modern sulpha and miracle drugs. He has lived and loved every minute of it ? but has never forgotten his proud French heritage and still greets customers with a ?Bon jour? and still frequently lapses into the old French Creole custom of ?lagniap-pe? (a little something extra, like a candy drop for the children) and still loyally flies the Flag of France on Bastile Day every Fourth of July.
In this deMontluzin Drug Store that hag been in the possession
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and operation of the same family for 80 consecutive years the customer or visitor is rewarded with a fascinating and firsthand view of pharmacy?s past. In this historic store which was once called an apothecary there have been carefully preserved (although no lunger used; such professional in-< dispensables of the last century as the heavy brass mortar and pestle tills generation has read about but has never seen ? with which the pharmacist of our forefathers ground his pills and potions.
PILL MACHINE
And there is, also, the pill machine with which he shaped them into the pellets that the doctors or he prescribed. There is the cork press that preceded the age of glass stoppers and the modern
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tainers. There are the iron scales, delicately accurate to the milligram that weighed out the powders and prescriptions that allayed the fevers and relaxed the miseries that medical science had not yet named.
In this historic and paradoxically modern little Bay St. Louis drug store the two Renes have deliberately and proudly preserved for posterity the now almost forgotten three foot high apothecary jars never seen except in period movies, but which were once the very symbol of the drugstore.- The original floor to ceiling black French shutters are a tantilizing^ treat to tourists and a temptation}' tn antique dealers. Even the old. fashioned convex display cases and' the frosted glass partition behind' the counter with the prescription1 department are picturesque pages from pharmacy?s past.