The oldest room on Main Street,
and the loudest one too.

The first druggist on the property was a man named John Moran. In the 1910s he hired a teenage clerk and soda jerk named Frank Gray, who learned the trade across the marble counter and never left. By 1931, Frank Gray, Sr. owned the place. He renamed it Gray Drug Company a decade later and ran it himself until 1967, when he died at the age of eighty-three after sixty-two years as a Franklin pharmacist.

He installed the neon sign in 1956. It has been on the same brick face, in the same red, ever since.

The bones of that drugstore are still here. The pressed-tin ceiling. The heart-pine floors, scuffed soft from a hundred and fifty years of foot traffic. The names of the men who worked the back counter, etched into the front-window glass. A clerk's handwritten chronicle on the third-floor staircase wall — weddings, deaths, headlines, weather — kept up year after year by someone who believed the building was worth writing things down in.

When the pharmacy finally closed for good in 2004, the doors were locked and the lights went out. The building stood empty on Main Street for the better part of a decade. The plaster cracked, the tin ceiling sagged, but the brick held and the sign stayed put. Franklin grew up around it.

In 2012 Michael and Joni Cole, who had moved to Franklin from Alabama and waited five years for the building to come up for sale, took it on. Michael — a retired Disney artist and architect — led an eighteen-month restoration. They kept the tin and the heart-pine. The booth seating was built from doors pulled out of the walls; the tabletops were milled from the wood that came out with them. Pharmacy bottles and prescription tickets dating to 1890, found in cigar boxes on the third floor, were framed and hung. The clerk's wall was left exactly as he wrote it.

On August 4, 2013, the city closed Main Street. The neon sign came back on. Three thousand people came to watch. The building has been open ever since.