POWERGRAMS

30 business filling prescriptions. Smith bought the pharmacy in 1979, relocated for a few years after a 1983 fire burned out the top story of the original building, then bought a vacant property from the city and built his current store. He had no plans to move back home after graduating from Auburn University, spending a year each in Pensacola and Mobile pharmacies, before his father was murdered in a 1978 holdup at Florala's Phillips 66 station. Ed Smith had owned the little corner building for 53 years when his life was taken at age 74. The man arrested and charged in his killing was acquitted, but less than a year ago made a jailhouse confession to Charles Smith. Today, the son maintains his father's station almost like it looked when it opened nearly a century ago. He can look across the street from the pharmacy and see the Red Crown gasoline pumps, the flip signs advertising gasoline for 22.5 cents per gallon and other authentic aspects of the old filling station. After his father's death, Smith planned to come back home, tear down that station harboring such terrible memories and build a pharmacy there. Instead, it's become another historic landmark for Florala. "Very few of those stations have survived as they were, so I'm glad I built on the bigger lot," Smith says. A champion of the old and new for his hometown, Charles Smith and a business partner are buying Florala City School, which closed in 2010. They will relinquish the 1912 building to a nonprofit foundation to restore it as a cultural arts center. Today, Smith employs 25 local people in his pharmacy, which was founded in 1904. Eighteen months ago, he began selling guns, ammunition and other sporting goods just across the aisles from where he hands customers their prescriptions. He said the latest addition to Florala Pharmacy filled a niche because no other local stores sell what hunters need. "It's kind of like the stores of old – we have a little of everything," Smith says. "You look at Wal-Mart and they've got all this stuff. But we're not a Wal-Mart by any stretch of the imagination … and don't want to be." A Century and Counting Nearly century-old pictures of Cox Hardware could easily be confused with a black and white selfie shot last week. The 5th Avenue fixture since 1916 still has the same rolling ladders reaching high up the long rows of supplies lining both side walls. The same electric fan hangs from the ceiling that pulled in cool winds from the open front doors before Richard Barnes bought the store more than two decades ago. "It really hasn't changed any," says Barnes, who was born in nearby Lockhart and visited Cox Hardware as a child. In September 1977, Barnes was hired to work afternoons in the store as part of the vocational education program at Florala High School. "It's interesting that the man who hired me had worked here 41 years," he says as his career at Cox approaches the same duration. "There were six Cox brothers, five of them in the hardware business, two of them in Florala. Me and my wife bought the store in 1991 and have been here ever since." Barnes says the business was different a century ago when Cox Hardware was one of the most necessary and thriving stores in town. Train cars of merchandise would roll in to refill the shelves. Today, Barnes, his wife, Marilyn, and employee Bobby Martin sell "basic hardware" to a much smaller customer base that includes contractors and do-it-yourselfers looking for electrical, plumbing and painting supplies. Marilyn works three days in the hardware store and three days in Marilyn's Hair Magic & Makeup Studio just up the street. If it's up to the Barnes, Cox Hardware will be open another century. They are proud of their part in continuing the legacy and keeping their familiar hometown customers happy. "I never have cared to move," he says. "I've always found this to be home, never found any place I liked better than Florala." 1935 postcard shows downtown looking much like today. Ed Smith's Phillips 66 filling station restored to original look.

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