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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — On June 17, 1899, druggist John Janney closed the pharmacy he had operated at 701 King Street, at the northwest corner of King and Washington streets, and left Alexandria for Newport News, where he planned to open a new drugstore. It was the first time in more than 50 years that Alexandrians could remember the prominent corner storefront sitting empty.
The corner of King and Washington in 1899 was one of Alexandria's busiest commercial intersections. King Street was the city's main retail spine, with shops, taverns, banks and offices stretching from the Potomac waterfront west toward the rail station. Washington Street, the colonial-era north-south route through the city, crossed it at the highest point of the King Street rise — a corner so prominent that any business there was a visible feature of daily life. A vacant storefront on that intersection was unusual enough to be newsworthy.
The corner would not stay empty long. And the family name that would replace Janney's would remain on Alexandria pharmacy signs for the next 105 years.
The Timberman brothers
Charles Parke Custis Timberman and his older brother John Elmer Winfield Timberman were born near Pohick Church — Charles in 1878, John in 1876 — and spent their early childhood at Rosehill Farm just outside Alexandria. The family later moved to 209 S. Fairfax St. in Old Town, which would serve as the Timberman family homestead for decades. Both brothers would become pharmacists.
Charles ran a pharmacy at 824 King St. in partnership with Richard Gibson — Gibson & Timberman — until the partnership dissolved in 1904. He then moved to Philadelphia to take a position with a drug firm there, where he worked until his death in 1917. He was buried in Alexandria.
John took a different path. After passing the state pharmacist's examination in 1895, he took a position at the King and Washington Streets drugstore owned by Ernest L. Allen — the same store that had taken over the Janney location after Janney left for Newport News. When Allen died in 1906, John Timberman took over the proprietorship. The store became known as Timberman's Drug Store.
The neon sign
Timberman's would operate at 701 King Street for more than four decades, through both World Wars, the Great Depression and the postwar years. John Timberman retired in 1943, but the business continued under his name with Francis X. Nugent — who had begun working at the pharmacy as a clerk in 1917 — as proprietor.
Around 1950, the pharmacy relocated one building north, to 106 N. Washington St., after the estate of Allen's son sold the original property. At the new location, Nugent added an angled neon sign to brighten the more modest storefront. That sign would become one of the most recognizable retail signs in Old Town for the next half-century.
Timberman's finally closed in 2004 — 105 years after John Janney first turned his key in the lock for the last time.
The ghost on King Street
The original 19th-century building at 701 King Street that housed Janney's pharmacy, the Allen pharmacy and the early years of Timberman's was demolished in 1954, replaced by a more modest two-story structure. Look carefully today at the east side of the building at 703 King Street, just next door, and the "ghost" of the older building's roofline is still visible in the brick — a small architectural shadow of the corner that once held Alexandria's most prominent pharmacy.
The Timberman storefront one building north, at 106 N. Washington St., today houses Sev Laser, a chain offering laser hair removal and skin care services. The neon sign that once hung over the pharmacy entrance is now in the collection of The Lyceum: Alexandria's History Museum.
A reader walking past the intersection now stands on the same spot where Alexandrians had been buying medicine, cosmetics, and the small goods of daily life for the better part of a century, under a series of names — Janney, Allen, Timberman — that connected three generations of Alexandria life to one corner of King and Washington.
Information via the City of Alexandria's Office of Historic Alexandria and the Library of Congress.
