Hidden behind the brick facade of the wood-frame building is what may be the oldest surviving storefront in downtown West Branch. The abstract for the property shows Edwin Grinnell bought the lot from John M. Wetherell on June 22, 1869. Although there's no surviving record of when Grinnell erected a building to house his drug store, he very likely did so right away. If so, his store pre-dates J.W. Witter's building now known as Crook's Hotel, which was built in 1870.
Grinnell's drug store's address was listed as 9 Main Street in an advertisement that appeared in the June 15, 1871, issue of The Index, West Branch's first newspaper. Grinnell shared his store with H.T. Hollingsworth, who did watch repairs. A series of druggists and jewelers would occupy the building over the next 53 years. By 1878, Grinnell had abandoned the pharmacy business in favor of a job with the railroad. Succeeding him as a druggist was J.H. Lloyd, who apparenfly leased the building for some years before buying it in 1889 - the same year an item about his business appeared in The West Branch Times under the headline, "Their Business Booming":

"Probably no one thing has caused such a general revival of trade at J.H. Lloyd's drug store as their giving away to customers so many free trial bottles of Dr. King's New Discovery for consumption," the item reads. "Their trade is simply enormous in this very valuable article from the fact it always cures and never disappoints."

Horse Doctoring, Too
For 25 cents a box, Lloyd also sold "St. Patrick's Pills," billed as a cathartic and liver treatment. Lloyd's drug store was also stocked to meet the medicinal needs of four-legged customers, with concoctions such as Dr. Cady's Condition Powders. "They one-up the digestive organs, free the system of worms, give the horse a good appetite, causing them to shed freely and putting them in good shape for hard work," claimed an 1885 ad.

Lloyd eventually gave up the drug business for farming. In 1894, he sold the building to William P. Whipple, who leased it and later sold it to jeweler Orr L. Keith. In addition to the standard assortment of watches, jewelry and silverware, Keith was a dealer in musical instruments, including violins, guitars, banjos and mandolins. When the West Branch Band performed on March27, 1896, in the new Opera House on North Downey Street, Keith boasted in an advertisement he placed in the concert's printed program that the sheet music and the instruments being used by the band had been purchased in his shop.
In time, Keith moved his jewelry business to nearby Iowa City, where, according to a story in the April 30, 1908, issue of The West Branch Times, he became that city's "leading jeweler." Keith leased his West Branch storefront to another jeweler, George W. Macomber. "The store is neatly fitted and arranged with commendable taste," said a long-winded profile of West Branch businesses that appeared in a November 1912 issue of the local paper. "The stock is full and carefully selected as will usually be found in towns much larger than West Branch. The handsome show cases and side cases are filled with watches of many makes, gold and sterling silverware, cut glass novelties, jewelry to suit all taste and purses, ebony goods and in fact everything carried in a first-class jewelry establishment, while the prices are as reasonable as is consistent with conservative business methods."

From Jewelry to Hindquarters
The building would house yet another jeweler, Earl L. Gregg, before being sold in 1924 for $1,000 to local butcher Fred Albin. He used the building as a new location for his meat market, which had been located since 1917 on North Downey Street in the back of the West Branch State Bank Albin added a back room to the old building after first digging a basement to accommodate an ammonia ice machine required to cool the butcher shop's meat storage areas. He also added the brick facade.
Four years after Fred Albin died in 1957, his family sold the building to Dr. R.G. Stuelke. A year later, he re-sold it to Robert and Eleanor Petersen, and it was used as a variety store and, later, as a clothing store. After the building was sold again in 1974 to Dale and Mary Ellen Van Ginkel, it was leased and used briefly as an ice cream store - The Ice Cream Palace. Later, the Van Ginkels remodeled an upstairs storage room into an apartment and converted the street-level storefront into an antique store. In recent years the building has been used as a bakery and coffee shop, a photographers studio, an office, and a dentist's office