Harris Drug Store Marks 130 Years
The Moosehead Historical Society opened this year’s History by the Lake series with a story worth telling, and the choice was not hard. Harris Drug Store has been on Main Street for 130 years now, and I don’t think there’s a family in Greenville who doesn’t have some memory tied to that store: a prescription, an ice cream, a summer job, a familiar face behind the counter.
On July 2 of this year, Mike and Lisa Harris sat down with us at the Center for Moosehead History to talk about their family and that store, a story that goes back to 1896 and is still being written today.
I asked them both the same question: what do you picture first when you think of Harris Drug Store? Mike didn’t hesitate. “To me, it’s where I grew up,” he said. He remembered stopping in after school to watch his father work, hoping for ice cream, seeing his grandmother, and spending his summers around the place.
Lisa’s answer was different, but just as telling. “Location, location, location,” she said. Every morning when she opens the store, she turns around and there’s the lake, the same view her grandparents and great-grandparents had before her.
That’s what makes this story more than a business history. It’s a place people remember.
It started in 1896, when Isaac Augustus Harris came to Greenville and bought the pharmacy from Dr. Hiram Hunt. The town was growing, and a pharmacist mattered to daily life in a way that’s hard to picture now. Isaac and his wife, Nora, raised their family here, and the drugstore became woven into the whole Harris family’s life, not just Isaac’s work.
Mike put it simply: his great-grandfather filled a need and helped the town grow. Lisa added that Isaac studied at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, the same school Mike would later attend, and that his obituary described his work as an invaluable service, done with kindness and charity. One of Isaac’s daughters, Mary Harris Wortman, remembered the store staying open at all hours for people who were sick. As Lisa said during the program, “sickness doesn’t come on schedule.” When people needed him, Isaac was there.
That sense of responsibility carried through every generation that followed.
Isaac and Nora’s son Wilbur, whom most people called Gus, was born in 1903 and grew up with the drugstore as part of his life. By the late 1920s he was working alongside his father. By around 1931, he appears to have taken on major responsibility for the business. Isaac lived until 1940, so for a while father and son were both part of the store’s story at once. Like a lot of family businesses, that handoff seems to have happened gradually rather than all at once.
Wilbur married Ida Bell of Guilford in 1935. They had two children, Arlene and Harold, the boy who’d grow up to be known as Gussie.
Wilbur was more than a pharmacist. Sportswriter Owen Osborne called him “Mr. Greenville,” and from what Mike and Lisa told me, that fits. He served in the Maine Legislature, coached and played baseball, hunted and fished, and by every account never turned down a chance to help a younger athlete. Lisa remembers a customer telling her that Wilbur used to let him come over and watch baseball on TV because his own family didn’t have one.
My favorite story from the program: in 1947, Ted Williams was heading home from a fishing trip up north when bad weather stranded his party in Greenville. They needed a ride to Bangor. Owen Osborne called Gus Harris, and Gus came right over. Somewhere on that drive, Wilbur got to ask Ted Williams his baseball questions. Mike still has the baseball Williams signed for his father that July, inscribed to Harold.
In 1961, Wilbur died in a fishing accident on Lower Wilson Pond. Greenville lost a pharmacist, a legislator, a sportsman, and a friend to a lot of people. Ida lost her husband, and Gussie lost his father, right as the future of the store hung in the balance. Gussie was still in school at the time and wouldn’t be back in Greenville full time until 1964.
Lisa calls what happened next her grandmother’s “grit.” Ida believed that if she could keep the business running, Gussie would eventually be ready to step in. Mike told me Ida ran the day-to-day operations herself until Gussie could take on more. She lived upstairs from the store, and Lisa remembers her as “always there.” The two of them worked side by side.
Then, two years later, on December 27, 1963, fire destroyed the old Harris Drug Store. Mike was told the family was at Rollie Wortman’s playing cards when Ida called to say the store was burning. They ran the business out of the Greenville Insurance building while a new store went up. For a family that had already lost so much, that fire could have been the end of the story.
Instead, by August 1964, Harris Drug Store had reopened, not just rebuilt but the store people know today, prescription counter, soda fountain, and all. Mike remembers it as a fresh start: more room, jewelry cases, the fountain, more products. Lisa says the rebuilding told the town something important: that the family was staying, and staying to serve.
That future rested largely on Gussie, who was still a young man when the responsibility landed on him, a lot bigger than he probably expected. He’d likely pictured easing into the business alongside his father. Instead, as Mike put it, “it was the way it was.” Gussie and Ida made it work.
Gussie became the third generation of Harris pharmacists and, for more than fifty years, a fixture of daily life at Harris Drug, until his death in 2019. In 1983, Gussie came down with encephalitis, likely from a mosquito bite, though he always said it was a mystery how he got it. It left him with slurred speech and a change in his gait that stayed with him the rest of his life, and Lisa said it changed his personality too. He kept working the counter anyway. Mike remembers his father as caring, honest, and always willing to help. Lisa says he never had a bad word for anybody, never judged, and met people where they were. He served on the school board, worked with Kiwanis and the recreation department, loved a good joke, and loved chocolate.
The store itself carries all these layers. The soda fountain went in in 1949 and, after the 1964 rebuild, became part of the store generations of us remember. Mike and Lisa told me people still walk in and say it reminds them of an easier time, or their own hometown’s soda fountain. Parents and grandparents bring kids in just to show them what one looks like.
The family had another spot tied to Greenville’s memory too: Frosteeland, which opened in July 1952. Sometime in the 1970s or ’80s, people started calling it the Dairy Bar, and the name stuck alongside the original. If the drugstore was everyday life, Frosteeland was summer. Mike remembers being babysat there, watching his father mix ice cream from the window seat. Lisa worked there every summer as soon as she was old enough. Gussie had his own regular order, known simply as “the Gussie.” The spot is still tied to summer today. The family leases the dairy bar space, now operating as King’s Treats, but for many people that location still carries the memory of Frosteeland.
Carol Harris is part of this story too. She and Gussie met in Boston, married in 1963, and moved to Greenville that same year. For the next twenty years she raised Mike and Lisa, built a life here, and became part of the family’s daily rhythm, even without her name on the store. In 1983 she opened the Corner Shop, starting small and growing it into her own successful business downtown. Lisa connects Carol’s deeper involvement in the shop to the period of Gussie’s illness, when the pharmacy’s future felt uncertain again. Carol was active well beyond the shop too: church, the hospital auxiliary, the ambulance service. She came from away, Lisa said, and Greenville took her in, and she gave right back. Carol died in 2021.
Mike and Lisa each found their own way back to the family business. Lisa left Greenville, spent years working in Boston, and then one day, sitting in traffic, thought, “This is crazy.” She came home, and today she runs the Corner Shop, the business her mother built.
Mike never seriously considered anything but pharmacy. It’s what he knew, what he loved, and where he wanted to be. He’s now the fourth generation of Harris pharmacists, following Isaac, Wilbur, and Gussie, and runs Harris Drug Store today.
The work looks different than it used to: computers, insurance instead of cash, all the complications of modern pharmacy. But one of the best moments of the program came when Lisa held up a simple pill tray and spatula, the same tools her father used and her brother still uses every day. Some things haven’t changed at all.
That commitment shows up in something simple, too: Harris Drug Store has been open seven days a week since 1896, closing only for major holidays. In a place as rural as Greenville, where the next pharmacy can be a long drive away, that kind of reliability isn’t just good business. It’s what people count on.
What hasn’t changed most is the commitment to people. Mike talked about the freedom of being an independent pharmacist. If someone needs medicine and the paperwork has to wait, he helps first and sorts out the rest later. He’ll charge it, let someone pay when they can, stay late, or make a delivery, because the person in front of him needs help.
Lisa tied all of it back to an old photograph of Isaac Harris standing under a sign that reads, in part: “First Registered Pharmacist to Settle in Greenville — 1896 — Still on the Job Inside.”
To Lisa, that phrase says it all: still on the job.
What made the afternoon special was not just the dates and names, but hearing Mike and Lisa explain what those generations felt like from inside the family.
That’s the Harris family story, as I heard it. Different generations, different businesses, different eras. But the same responsibility to the people of this town, carried for 130 years, through fire, loss, illness, and everything else that’s come along. The Harrises have kept showing up. I suspect they always will.
If you’d like to hear it in their own words, the full program is posted on our website: Mooseheadhistory.org.
Isaac Augustus Harris, founder of Harris Drug Store, beside a sign marking his role as Greenville’s first registered pharmacist. The phrase “Still on the Job” became a fitting theme for the Harris family’s 130-year story.
Mike and Lisa: Brother and sister Mike and Lisa Harris at the Harris Drug Store soda fountain in 2026. Mike is the fourth-generation Harris pharmacist, and Lisa continues the family’s downtown business legacy through the Corner Shop.
Ida Harris at Harris Drug Store. After Wilbur Harris died in 1961, Ida helped keep the business going until Gussie could fully step in.
Gussie and Carol: Harold “Gussie” Harris and Carol Harris. Gussie became the third generation of Harris pharmacists, while Carol later opened the Corner Shop and built her own downtown business story.