Imken & Neese Drugs store • Pflugerville

Imken & Neese Drugs store • Pflugerville

By Pam Stephenson Friday, 06 February 2009

For more than five decades, Imken & Neese Drugs store in Pflugerville provided a variety of services to the small rural community. Emil Imken and John Neese were brothers-in-law, according to the niece of both men, Jeanette Pfluger Burk. After Imken and his family moved to Taylor and he began working at a drugstore there, Neese (pronounced nay-see) continued to operate the drugstore on Main Street, just west of the old First State Bank building.

“My grandfather operated the store from about 1910 until he became ill in 1962,” said Neese’s grandson Robert “Bob” Johnson, a resident of Georgetown. “I loved to go to the store where my grandfather had a soda fountain and small tables with wire chairs. I still have one of the chairs. He had a scale where you could get weighed for a penny and an old hand crank Victrola in the back. I loved to play the records on it.”

For many years Neese’s drugstore was the only store in the area with a soda fountain where you could get ice cream. While some enjoyed their ice cream treats at the small tables, many customers took their ice cream to the bench on the sidewalk in the front of the store. That bench is now on the front porch of the Heritage House Museum in Pflugerville.

“It was a Sunday evening treat that we could go up and get an ice cream cone in the evening after church when he would open up,” said long-time Pflugerville resident Dorothy Caldwell Ates in an interview for the Pflugerville Oral History Project. “In the summertime he had this real special peach ice cream that we just loved.”

Bernice Zreet worked part-time in the drugstore for several years while a high school student. After graduating, she continued to work at the store until she married in 1948.

“Mr. Neese was one of the kindest, most loving and honest men,” Zreet said.

Burk also worked for her uncle part time at the store while she was in high school in the early 1940s.

“Mr. Neese was there to help people,” Burk said. “He was frequently asked to offer advice on medicines for various ailments.”

Burk recalled how her uncle personally mixed the medicines in the back of the store to fill the prescriptions from the local doctors. Several doctors occupied offices a couple of days a week just above Neese’s store.

Candy — five pieces for a penny — cosmetics, very nice jewelry, hygiene products, over-the-counter medicines and school supplies were also sold in the drugstore, Burk said.

Neese served as the Pflugerville postmaster for several years prior to 1935. During his tenure, the drugstore also operated as the post office. Neese had the postal boxes on wheels so that he could move the boxes to the door to enable residents to pick up their mail after church.

With his health failing, Neese, at 83 years of age, was forced to close the store in 1962. He died the following year.