Bristol Drugstore Incident Changed One Man’s Life

By Bud Phillips
Special to the Herald Courier
Published: May 18, 2008

I have long and often said that if a thing can happen, anything at all, it has happened in Bristol.
You name, good or bad, in between, weird, strange, far out, whatever – at some time it has happened here.
The incident and its consequences of which I will now write may be strange and far out, but no more so than some other things that have happened here. I may write of some of them later.
In 1875, Dr. Charles Taylor Pepper, of Dr. Pepper soft drink fame, was operating a drug store here, along with a thriving medical practice. His drug store was on the Tennessee side of the 500 block of Main (now State) Street, about where the Theatre Bristol office is now located. His office was in the back room of this store.
The business of the drug store had increased to the point that he needed more help. He hired a young man, Trevor Martin, who had recently arrived here from Wytheville. He had been employed by a drug store in that town, so was well experienced in the business.
Martin had plans to soon take up the study of medicine so that he too might become a practicing physician. He would soon have the opportunity to prove that he was a more effective, and certainly faster, healer than was his employer.
Martin would never forget the date nor the hour when the strange event happened that instantly changed his entire outlook on life, and marked the beginning of a career that for over 50 years would take him into every state in the Union.
Certainly, it was a very unusual career, but one which he pursued with missionary zeal to the very final hour of his life.
It was on Saturday, June 12, 1875 at 2 p.m., when an obviously distraught young man entered Pepper’s Drug Store. Though Martin did not know it at the time, it was supposed to have been the young man’s wedding hour.
He did notice that the rather nervous fellow was unusually well dressed. For some reason, the bride-to-be had changed her mind, even as the guests were arriving at the local Presbyterian church for the ceremony.
The devastated young man had fled from the church and hastened to the nearest drug store, which happened to be where Martin was employed.
At the store, the young man immediately asked for a bottle of some type of deadly poison. Martin quickly realized what was about to happen.
Instead of giving the man what he ordered, he handed him a bottle of some harmless liquid. Just as he had thought, the troubled customer jerked out the cork, cried out that he just couldn’t go on and quickly downed the contents of the bottle.
Almost immediately, he swayed a time or two, then fell to the floor, and there began gasping for breath, writhing and convulsing. From all symptoms, it appeared that he was actually dying.
Dr. Pepper was called for. He came running, and upon observation, he was convinced that the young man was indeed dying.
As he thought upon what to do, Martin had another idea. He grabbed another bottle of the same fluid and before the dying man’s eyes, drank it down saying, “See, see, this isn’t poison, it can do you no harm ... it’s just sweetened water.”
The man sat up and blinked a time or two as the truth soaked in. He then jumped up and ran from the store.
This strange happening had a different effect on Martin. Instantly, he came to the conclusion (he called it a great revelation) that if negative faith could bring on death, then positive faith could bring health and life.
His work of dispensing medicine was over. He immediately left his job with Pepper and went out spreading his doctrine of positive faith healing. For the next 50 years, he traveled all over America, expounding the “revelation” he had experienced in Dr. Pepper’s Drug Store in Bristol, Tenn.
I suppose that mind power finally failed him. He died Dec. 25, 1925, at Seffner, Hillsborough County, Fla. He is buried in an old cemetery near there. On his marker is inscribed, “Mind triumphs over matter.”

BUD PHILLIPS is a local historian and author. He can be reached at (276) 466-6435.