Red Bay Pharmacy celebrates opening
The Franklin County Chamber of Commerce welcomed a new business into its fold, complete with a ribbon cutting ceremony, Dec. 1. Bill and Donna Weatherford have opened Red Bay Pharmacy after spending a year reconstructing the building’s interior.
According to Bill, it took two weeks for ServPro, a restoration service company, to clean out and basically gut the inside of the building before construction could even begin.
“The building sat vacant for years even after we bought it back in 2011,” he said.
He credited ServPro as “hero No. 2” for the pharmacy because he said no construction company would work on the building without it being cleaned out first.
“Hero No. 1” is local Billy Bolton.
“Everyone was telling me to demolish the building and start over until Billy Bolton. He said of course we should keep the original structure,” Bill said.
The building has historical value for Red Bay, he explained even though it hasn’t been around as long as places like Hotel Red Bay, and he wanted to preserve that history.
Maintaining loyalty to the area and to the citizens is why the Weatherfords said they waited until now to open the Red Bay Pharmacy. In 2013 the couple first opened a pharmacy in Belmont, Miss.
“I didn’t want to provide any competition here in Red Bay with J.C. (Weeks, owner of Redmont Pharmacy), so we chose to open the first pharmacy in Belmont,” Bill said.
Bill said that the original plan was to open a pharmacy in Red Bay after Weeks, a long-time friend to the Weatherfords and a former employer to Donna, retired. The game changer, as Weatherford calls it, was when the CVS in Red Bay closed, leaving a gap to be filled in the community.
Bill said he decided to open Red Bay Pharmacy because he believed it would be better for the community and for Weeks to have a familiar, friendly face instead of an outside company that would be more competitive and solely focused on the business side of things.
“I believe it’s to everyone’s advantage, and we hope to meet more than just the prescription needs of the community,” he said.
