When Isaac Augustus Harris purchased a pharmacy from Dr. Hiram Hunt in 1896, there was no road to Rockwood, no power, no telephone, and no Dr. Fred Pritham. The Great Northern Paper Company hadn’t yet begun cutting operations at Moosehead Lake. Greenville was a different place — and yet, from that moment forward, there would always be a Harris Drug Store at the center of it.

One hundred and thirty years later, that is still true.

What Isaac started, his son Wilbur carried forward. Wilbur ran the store for thirty years, raising his family above Main Street the way small-town pharmacists did in those days — the store and the family inseparable. When Wilbur died in a fishing accident in 1961, his wife Ida stepped in alongside their son Harold, who had just come home from pharmacy school in Boston. For nearly thirty years, mother and son ran the store together until Ida’s passing in 1990. That year, his son Michael joined him behind the counter — the first time in the store’s history that two pharmacists worked side by side in Greenville. When daughter Lisa returned from Boston in the mid-1990s, trading city traffic for Moosehead’s lakes and trees, she took over The Corner Shop next door, which Gus had purchased and opened as a gift shop. The family also expanded the old post office space and has operated the popular Dairy Bar since the 1950s.

Through it all — fires, changing downtown blocks, the rise of insurance-driven pharmacy, the pressures facing independent businesses everywhere — the Harris family kept showing up. Gus put it simply: he enjoyed his work and never thought about retirement. Carol, his wife and business partner, said the secret was discipline, a good crew, and a community that rallies when the going gets tough. Gus passed away in 2019, and Carol in 2021, but the business they built together is still very much alive, with Michael and Lisa continuing the family tradition.

Harris Drug is one of the few independently owned pharmacies remaining in Maine. It is also one of the few places in the state where you can still get a root beer float at a shiny chrome soda fountain.

Join Michel and Lisa Harris as they mark this milestone anniversary and share the story of four generations on Main Street — a story that is, in many ways, the story of Greenville itself.

Thursday, July 2, 2026 | 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM Center for Moosehead History