The Citizen-Times is reporting that the American Chestnut Foundation is moving its headquarters from Vermont to the U.S. Forest Service building near UNC Asheville. The foundation has had an Asheville office, but now the national headquarters are moving to town.
A year ago, the American Chestnut Foundation announced a $1 million lead gift from the Stanback family of North Carolina. The family made a fortune off of selling headache powders, as this Salisbury Post story notes:
The Stanback Company got its start in 1911 when Tom Stanback was a young pharmacist working in a Thomasville drug store.
And he probably would have stayed there but for a broken heart.
When he and his girlfriend parted, he quit his job in Thomasville and had visions of heading west where a pharmacist, it was said, could make up to $100 a month.
Meanwhile, the pharmacist at Rowan Drug Store in Spencer decided to go on vacation, and Stanback, then 26, accepted a job as relief man with a salary of $88 a month. He gave samples of his new headache powders to railroaders who carried them up and down the Southern line. Hence, that mail order from a woman, Mrs. W.F. Fife, in May 1911, and she forever was considered the first person to “snap back with Stanback.”
But his was just the formula for success. He had combined a new drug, aspirin, with several other ingredients to make the powder he sold over the counter to some of his customers.
As an aside, I used to love me some headache powders. I lived off Goody’s for years, until I decided it might be eating away my stomach lining. Like sweet tea and barbecue, headache powders are a Southern tradition. And now a little of that money might help restore the chestnut tree.