Ignatius Fealy
A while back, John DeFerrari posted an image of a postcard from 1911 showing the corner of 11th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue SE. That corner has changed quite a bit since then, especially with the building of two condos, the Butterfield House and Penn Eleven. Other than their uses, these two buildings have another thing in common: Both at one point were the site a drugstore run by one Martin S. Fealy.
Fealy was born in D.C. in 1875, the son of Thomas J. Fealy. The elder Fealy’s father, also named Thomas J., was known for having died in an explosion at the Washington Arsenal. Not the infamous explosion that brought President Lincoln to Congressional Cemetery in 1864, but another tragedy that took place in December 1865, when munitions being brought from the forts surrounding Washington were being collected for disposal.
Martin Fealy’s father also died in a tragedy, this time when he tried to save a young boy from a collapsing building during a storm. While the boy survived, Fealy and one other were killed. His funeral was officiated by his son, Ignatius Fealy, who can be seen above. Ignatius had been assistant pastor at St. Joseph’s on the Hill.
By the time of Thomas J Fealy Sr.’s death, Martin had graduated from both Gonzaga and the Washington College of Pharmacy, married the former Leida Amelia Bache and had opened a pharmacy on the northwest corner of 11th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, southeast, or the current Butterfield House.
Martin had also looked to the future, purchasing in 1905 part of the lot on the southeast corner of the same intersection (the Frager’s/Paraíso Taqueria/Penn Eleven corner), and six years later, more land adjacent to the previous piece. It would not be until 1920 that he would begin the next phase of his plans, constructing a new building for his business. They moved around the middle of that year and the old store was almost immediately taken over by a branch of the Sanitary grocery store chain.
While the store continued its main purpose of filling prescriptions and selling Doan’s Pills, Zero Ice Cream and Ofterdinger cigars, they also were local agents for the Washington Evening Star, whose address was also 1101 Pennsylvania Avenue— except that the building was in the northwest quadrant of the city. If you wanted to insert an advertisement into that paper, you simply had to drop by the drug store.
Either Dr. Fealy himself or his assistants, Drs. Clifford Smith and Joseph Fealy, will take good care of your ads – forwarding them promptly to The Star.
While the coincidence between the two addresses was useful for people not conversant with the city’s addressing scheme, this was not the reason why the pharmacy was selected; the Star used such establishments all across the city for this purpose.
Fealy continued to run his store until his death in 1940, after which it was purchased by Thomas Roane, who renamed it Roane’s Pharmacy and ran it for the following ten years, until he, too, died. The building was eventually purchased by Frager’s Hardware store, and for a long time the paint store was the old drugstore. Today, while the interior is entirely gutted, the exterior is still the one built by Thomas Fealy 100 years ago.
Across the way, his original store suffered far greater indignities, being torn down to make way for a gas station and repair shop, which in turn gave way to the Butterfield House in 2008.