Our history

Dr. William Theodore Waas — a physician, born in 1866 and still in his twenties — buys the drugstore in Fernandina and puts his name on it. It has been a locally owned pharmacy on this island ever since, which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating businesses on Amelia Island. His prescription pad, printed W. Theo. Waas, M.D., still hangs framed in the store — and in 1893 he would have compounded and dispensed from behind this counter himself. The formal parting of physician and pharmacist came later.

Dr. Waas was also, by local account, the first person on Amelia Island to own a car — photographed at the wheel of it in a suit and a straw hat, somewhere in the palmettos.

Identified by the museum as Dr. William Theodore Waas (1866–1936), founder, in what is remembered as the first car on Amelia Island. Courtesy of the Amelia Island Museum of History Amelia Islander Magazine · July 2021 →

Glyndon H. Waas Sr. takes over the business and moves it to the corner of North 4th and Centre Street — the building Fernandina later knew as the Merrill Lynch building. The store stayed on that corner for the next thirty-six years.

The corner building that carries the family name was put up in 1884 by Samuel A. Swann, and in 1890 a metal facade was run across the second story to tie it to the 1880 building next door. Swann gave the upper floor rent-free to house Fernandina’s first library in the 1890s; the same room did duty for balls, recitals and amateur theatricals. Downstairs was Waas Drug Store, sharing the block with John T. Ferreira Insurance & Real Estate.

A museum postcard from 1952 catches the corner on an ordinary day: Arthur Simmons parked outside with his “Bullmobile” — an ox cart pulled by an ox named Billy that Simmons had raised from a calf. That cart was Fernandina’s garbage collection for more than thirty-five years. The windows behind him advertise cut-rate drugs and Foremost ice cream; the museum catalogs the photograph as “Bullmobile (oxcart) and Waas Drugs.”

Arthur Simmons and Billy, 1952 — the “Bullmobile,” parked on the sidewalk outside the drug store. Courtesy of the Amelia Island Museum of History · 1995.017.074 The storefront was restored in the 1980s by C. F. “Sonny” Rutishauser, Jr., who stripped a later facade back to the original wood-and-glass front with its three entrances. Old photographs label this street Atlantic Avenue — it was renamed Centre Street later on. Same road, same corner, two names. Museum record 1995.017.074 · 1952 →

Glyndon H. Waas Jr. takes the drugstore over from his father. He would run it for the next twenty-five years, and it is under him that the store makes its last move downtown.

A photographic print of the 300 block puts the store in the middle of a downtown that is still recognizable today — awnings out over the sidewalk, cars nosed in at an angle, the ocean at the end of the street. It survives in the Captain George T. Davis Collection, the work of a photographer who spent years pointing a camera at this town.

The neon read Waas · Walgreen Agency · Drugs. Independent drugstores of the era carried Walgreen products under an agency agreement — the sign, not the ownership. Note the date: the agency name was already over the old corner years before the Sixth Street store opened under it in 1956. Museum record 1991.053.011 · 1948 →

Architectural blueprints dated November 5, 1955 lay out a Waas Drug Store at 515 Centre Street, up by North 6th — eight pages of drawings from the post-war years, when the store was building rather than just keeping the doors open.

The Waas Walgreen Agency held its grand opening there on June 15, 1956. The grand prize that day was a Philco 21-inch television, which in 1956 was about the most exciting thing a drugstore could give away. That building still stands. Fernandina knows it now as The Anchor, alongside First Presbyterian Church.

J. Leonard Long, R.Ph. had entered the business two years earlier, in 1954. He would stay twenty-six years.

Centre Street in the early sixties — the Waas neon on the right, the courthouse clock tower down the block, and the ocean at the end of the street. Museum record 2026.052.001 · the 1955 blueprints →

In the summer of 1970, Jimmy Parker, R.Ph., fresh out of pharmacy school at the University of Georgia, comes to Fernandina Beach to work alongside Leonard Long — the pharmacist who had already spent many years behind this counter — Long had come to the store in 1954, so by then he had sixteen years of it. On January 1, 1971, Long and Parker become the owners, and seventy-eight years of the Waas name on the ownership papers come to an end.

The two run it together for a decade. In 1980 Jimmy buys Leonard’s half and Leonard Long retires after twenty-six years in the business. Jimmy stands behind that counter for another forty-one.

The store Jimmy Parker walked into — the low brick front and the WAAS DRUG STORE sign standing up over the roofline at 515 Centre. The museum’s print carries no date, and the pickups at the curb put the photograph well after 1970; but the building looked like this for most of the fifty years he spent behind that counter. Courtesy of the Amelia Island Museum of History Jimmy Parker behind his own counter, taking a call among the Georgia Bulldogs display he was locally famous for. He had come to Fernandina straight from pharmacy school at the University of Georgia and never did stop being a fan. Fernandina Beach News-Leader · photo by Lucy Beebe Dates and the sequence of ownership here come from Jimmy Parker himself, correcting the compressed version in the magazine feature.

The store turns one hundred, and the local paper says so. A News Leader photographer stands across the street and shoots the storefront again — the tall WAAS DRUG STORE sign standing up over the roofline at 515 Centre. Same name, same block, a century on.

The Sixth Street store in its last years downtown — the teal WAAS DRUG STORE sign, the live oak, the brick paving. The museum’s print carries no date, but the cars put it in the 1990s, which places it close to the centennial. Courtesy of the Amelia Island Museum of History Museum record 2023.100.521 · 1993 →

On May 19, 2000, after more than a century downtown, the store moves to 1551 South 14th Street — out where the island actually does its errands, with parking at the door instead of a hunt for a space. The name came with it, and so did the gift shop.

Jimmy Parker retires after fifty years as an owner, and hands the store to Katie Graves Kotopka, Pharm.D. — who first stood behind this counter as a high schooler, shadowing pharmacist Pam Simmons, and decided right there that pharmacy was the job she wanted. She went to Samford University’s McWhorter School of Pharmacy, spent twenty years in chain pharmacy, and came home to buy the place that started it.

“It is so special to me that the pharmacy that steered me toward this career is now going to be my own enterprise.”

Katie Kotopka and Jimmy Parker behind the counter, 2021. Museum record 2021.077.001 · 2021 →

Still at the same address, five minutes from the beach. Still an independent pharmacy — not a chain, not a franchise — and still sharing the floor with a gift shop, which is roughly what a hometown drug store has always been.

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