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A place where time stood still has offered two pharmacists the chance to turn back the clock.

Thanks to Jeff Biggs and Eddie Tuck, the marble soda fountain that stood for a century in the old Fordham's Drug Store downtown will again be dispensing soft drinks, ice cream and memories.

Biggs and Tuck, who closed Fordham's five years ago, want to move the fountain and some of the other fixtures from the abandoned drugstore to one they plan to open this fall.

"We want to give the new store an old look," Biggs said.

" ... When we bought Fordham's, we didn't realize what a piece of history we had. ... This move will allow us to keep some of that history so people can see it."

Fordham's opened in 1898 at 514 S. Elm St. and over the next 104 years became a Greensboro institution.

When Biggs and Tuck closed the store in 2002, they merged it with Lane's Drug Store, another pharmacy they own at 115 S. Elm St.

"That hurt a little bit," said Christopher C. Fordham III, the grandson of the store's founder and the former chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill. "But I knew the reason for it. ... The building was about to fall down."

Biggs and Tuck hated to move, too. Now, they say they're forced to relocate again.

This time, they plan to move Lane's to a shopping center they've bought at 2023 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

"I hate to lose them," said Sherry Adams, interim president of Downtown Greensboro Inc., speaking of a store that still offers home delivery, charge accounts and first-name service. "They're my pharmacy."

The move will leave the center city with only one drugstore — Burton's Health Mart Pharmacy on Lindsay Street.

Lane's and its predecessors have been part of Greensboro since 1950. Biggs and Tuck bought the store in the mid '90s.

They say they're leaving downtown because customers can't find parking.

"We're serving a population that needs easy access," Tuck said. "They can't walk three or four blocks."

Downtown merchants didn't have to worry about parking when Christopher Columbus Fordham opened his drugstore in the late 1890s.

Shoppers found a pharmacy that looked as if it been created on a Hollywood movie set.

It featured a giant mortar and pestle atop the building, display windows on either side of double doors made of oak, mosaic tile floors, a decorative tin ceiling, wood-and-glass display cabinets, wooden shelves along the walls filled with sundries, a 10-foot tall partition separating the front of the store from the pharmacy, bound ledgers holding prescription records, a scale for patrons to weigh themselves, small ice cream tables down the center of the store, a castor oil dispenser, a 26-key cash register and products that included Hoyt's Cologne, Lydia Pinkham Compound and Octagon soap.

About 1902, Fordham added the soda fountain.

"For our customers, that fountain is something they remember from their childhoods," Tuck said. "It ties Fordham to our new business."

The fountain came from the Lippincott Co. in Philadelphia. It featured a 12-foot long counter made of Mexican marble and a back bar with onyx columns inlaid with gold, a carved wooden cornice and stained glass and mirrors.

No one knows how much it cost.

"It's a beautiful piece," Biggs said. "I'm sure it wasn't cheap."

Over the years, the store served vanilla Cokes, cherry smashes and some of its own concoctions.

Soda jerks would regularly mix castor-oil cocktails. Ingredients included castor oil, root beer syrup and coffee. Customers also got a napkin, a mint and instructions to go straight home; the drink was a powerful laxative.

As the years passed, the store's owners had difficulty finding parts for the fountain. But Biggs hopes to find the equipment he needs to serve drinks the old-fashioned way, with a splash of this and a dash of that.

He and Tuck also want to restore the fountain. Over the years, it was sawed up in places to accommodate newer equipment or to open a passage at one end.

"It will look pretty," Biggs said, "but I want it to be functional, too,"

In the new store, he and Tuck will offer soft drinks, ice cream and a glimpse of the past.

"That store was a real anchor to south Greensboro," said Christopher Fordham. "It didn't change at all."

The store did get some new touches from time to time. For example, when Biggs and Tuck bought the business, they tossed out most of the circular display racks that the previous owner, Arnold Cherson, had brought in.

"We basically took it back to what it looked like before," Tuck said.

Over the years, Fordham's generated a long list of lore: It was the oldest continuously operating pharmacy in the state; it served the first Coca-Cola dispensed in Greensboro; and it integrated its soda fountain years before the historic sit-ins up the street at the Woolworth lunch counter.

After Fordham's closed, it became something of a pharmaceutical time capsule. Officials from the Greensboro Historical Museum and the North Carolina Museum of History called to inquire about obtaining certain objects.

The historical museum already has items from the Porter Drug Store, where William Sydney Porter, the writer known as O. Henry, clerked as a young man. Porter's stood just three doors south of Lane's.

"It wasn't that we needed another drugstore," said Jon Zachman, curator of collections at the historical museum. "It was that (Fordham's) was too important not to save and preserve .... It's better (for it) to be rescued than destroyed."

Christopher Fordham feels the same way. He appreciates what Biggs and Tuck are doing to preserve the store's heritage.

He recently called Tuck to see if he could have a portrait of his grandfather, which hung for years in the rear of Fordham's. But the pharmacist said he planned to use the painting in the new store, too.

"I melted," Fordham said of his request. "If they are planning to use it ... as part of Grandpa's legacy, let them."

Contact Donald W. Patterson at 373-7027 or donpatterson@news-record.com