The Küenster Building

The Küenster Building. 127 South Main. Hubert Küenster immigrated to America from Germany in May 1852. He came to St. Louis, where he was a clerk in Dr. Berghoff’s drug store for a year. Some of his countrymen were residents in the neighborhood of Waterloo, and at their request, Küenster moved to Waterloo and opened the first drug store in Monroe County out of his residence in 1853. The same day he moved to Waterloo, he married Bertha Berghoff, a sister of Dr. Berghoff., He continued his drug business until 1855, when he took a visit back home to Germany. He came back to America in 1856 and from 1857 to 1865, he ran a drug store at his residence and then moved the business to the old Borchert property, which he bought in 1865. In 1871 the building was demolished and the new Hubert Küenster Drug Store building was completed in 1872, perhaps the largest and finest building for business purposes, not only in Waterloo but in Monroe County. This is the building still standing today., P.A. Hamacher graduated from the St. Louis College of Pharmacy in 1895 and opened his own pharmacy in 1896 in the Küenster building at 127 South Main., During the prohibition, the government had a distillery in Kentucky that made bottled in bond 100 proof whiskey. It was available only by prescription from a doctor and sold at Hamacher’s., Daughter Adele Hamacher married Joseph Sidney (aka Sid) Wightman, who had an accounting degree from the University of Illinois. Sid later graduated from his father-in-law’s alma mater and took over the pharmacy in 1955, the same year P.A. Hamacher bought the Küenster building. P.A. Hamacher and Sid would mix their own chemical compounds by mortar and pestle. Wightman concocted “poison wheat” for farmers to use to kill field mice, which is now no longer allowed to be sold due to its high toxicity., From the very beginning, the pharmacy used to sell all kinds of home goods: from paint, to varnish, school textbooks and even fireworks. In those times, doctors would often dispense prescriptions from their office or take them along on house calls, so people didn’t have to use a pharmacy for medicine very often. The pharmacy also had a soda fountain open year-round, which made the store a popular local gathering place. The soda fountain was closed in 1948., Sid and Adele’s son, Tom Wightman, graduated St. Louis College of Pharmacy in 1959 and took over the pharmacy in 1963, with the help of his wife Bernice and his sister Betty, who inherited the building from Adele in 1968., Hamacher’s and then Wightman’s was Waterloo’s only pharmacy until the 1970s when Waterloo Pharmacy opened., The family heritage continued on, as Tom and Bernice’s son, Steve also graduated from the St. Louis School of Pharmacy in 1994 and has been running Wightman’s Pharmacy since 1999.