This intricately die-cut store display is from Philbrick’s Pharmacy in downtown Portsmouth, NH. It is over a century old and a foot tall. Its muted colors are neatly embossed on heavy card stock. I couldn’t resist it. All artifacts will eventually be donated to a local archive. And, as always, it pulled me down a day-long research rabbit hole.
The Philbricks have been here since the 17th century. David Thompson (Thomson), New Hampshire’s first European settler, few people know, was an apothecary, a guild that both mixed potions and prescriptions and sold them to the public. Dr. Hall Jackson, an eminent city doctor, also sold prescriptions in the latter 1700s.
Goodwin E. Philbrick was born in Portsmouth at the start of the Civil War in 1861. He learned his trade from David Kimball, who ran one of the earliest shops on Market Street in 1816. Philbrick’s was located at 45 Congress Street in the Franklin Block, still standing on Congress. A close-up photo shows it next to a dry goods store with a dentist’s office on the second floor. A sign on the sidewalk advertises root beer for a nickel.
Pharmacies, then and now, sold everything “from bibles to cameras,” according to a research report at the Portsmouth Athenaeum. Local newspaper ads show pharmacists offering knives, combs, brushes, sponges, perfumes, lavender smelling salts, liquor, ice cream, candy, and cigars. A competing druggist, Joseph Haven Thacher, eventually ran three stores in town, relying largely on the sale of patent medicines, often containing alcohol and opiates.
Goodwin Philbrick was a popular downtown druggist from 1875 into the 20th century. What began as a largely unregulated business was evolving into a federally monitored field. Initially partnered with his brother Frank, Goodwin managed his own store after 1896. He and his wife, Georgianna, had one child. Their daughter, Mildred Ayers Philbrick (born 1903) who also became a pharmacist.
Goodwin sold the business in 1938 to Arthur J. Healey, who moved the shop to Pleasant Street. The Athenaeum collection includes half a dozen photographs of Healey’s shop with hundreds of bottles on shelves behind a counter, a prominent refrigerator, and an ice cream cooler. The Philbricks retired to Mt Dora, Florida where Goodwin died soon after World War II in 1948.
While most stores offered colorful printed giveaways, back with advertisements, this girl with an umbrella is an exceptionally detailed item, reminiscent of the Morton’s Salt logo. It is a seasonal item, perhaps a holiday giveaway. The girl is holding a book and a sheaf of holly in one hand. At her feet, in the snow, a tiny Christmas tree is bracketed to a wooden sled with a lantern. On the back, in pencil, is the name “Frances,” who took great care.
© J. Dennis Robinson, 2026, all rights reserved. SOURCE: “The Evolution of Druggists in Portsmouth, NH, 1810-182” by DL Richards (1982)
Restoring the Athenaeum Reading Room