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As Greensboro awaits state action on a UNCG pharmacy school, let’s be careful about using that dangerous word “first.”

The school would not be a first here, just as the Elon University Law School wasn’t when it opened four years ago. The Greensboro Law School, also known as the Dick and Dillard Law School, operated here more than 100 years ago.

Page’s School of Pharmacy opened at 308½ S. Elm St. in the early 1900s, according to old city directories. A booklet published a few years after its opening boasted the school was established “years ago,” but no evidence exists to support the school’s claim of being venerable.

City directories indicate the school closed about 1917 or 1918. It later moved to Raleigh.

Page’s School of Pharmacy was founded by B. Frank Page, previously a chemist for Lunsford Richardson & Co., makers of Vick’s Vapo-Rub here.

This school was the first of three here named “Page” — the others being Page Private School, which operated from 1945 to the late 1970s; and Walter Hines Page High School, a public school that opened in 1958.

Page’s school wasn’t as selective or comprehensive as the one proposed by UNCG. Page was meant to help men who had not been to college get certified as pharmacists.

It was apparently legal then for uncertified pharmacists to work. Certification, however, gave the pharmacist prestige and provided reassurance to customers. The Page school also enrolled pharmacists desiring refresher courses.

The school operated, judging from photos in its advertising booklets, with a well-equipped lab and a lecture room on an upper floor of the Grissom Building.

Then and now, the building has 1899, the year it opened, at the top of its arched facade. A fire destroyed the interior 10 years ago, but the facade was saved and the interior reconstructed.

During the school’s time of residency, its fellow tenants included Grissom Drug Store, a heating company, a sign-making company, three physicians and Marine and Navy recruiters.

The school’s brochures were packed with testimonials from grads who had gone on to pass the state certification test. C.T. Eldridge of Greensboro, who would later join the school’s three-man faculty, wrote to Frank Page about the multipart state test, saying: “I tied with a college graduate for highest average. Having had no college course, I owe my success entirely to your thorough course and advise all unregistered men to take your course.”

According to one testimonial, 13 of 14 Page students taking the state exam one year passed. During the time the school operated, a new trend in pharmacy was enough to make Frank Page need a prescription for outrage.

Big wholesale drug companies had started supplying drugstores with ready-made products, eliminating the need for a pharmacist to measure and mix ingredients to make a medication.

Page, determined to keep on teaching the old way, wrote in a booklet: “A pharmaceutical lab was added to this school to supply a remedy of this growing evil,” referring to the new trend.

Nothing on file at the library indicates why Page’s School of Pharmacy closed. A later city directory showed a Frank Page working as a chemist for Greensboro’s Justice Drug Co. — one of those big wholesalers that his school once denounced.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net