By VERNON ROBISON
The Progress
Some carefully preserved pieces of Moapa history recently returned home from a long absence.
A few weeks ago, a whole shelf-full of various antique general store merchandise was donated to the heritage collection of the Old Logandale School Historical and Cultural Society (OLSHACS).
These were items that would have been common on store shelves in the early years of the 20th century. And they all were acquired more than 60 years ago from the T.W. Sloan and Co. store in Moapa, Nevada.
Phil Ray of Castle Rock, Colorado, paid a visit to the Old Logandale School on April 28 during a trip through the area. He brought with him three boxes full of these local historical treasures.
Ray, now in his 80s, has been a lifelong collector of all things old. He moved to Las Vegas as a teenager in 1953 and graduated from the then-new Rancho High School in 1957. He spent a successful career in the advertising industry in Las Vegas, until finally moving his company to Colorado in 1971.
Ray said that when he was young, he loved to go out and explore the ghost towns of Nevada. “We would go on road trips and visit old mining encampments and ghost towns, anything we could find,” Ray said.
During one of these trips in the late 1950s, Ray said he happened upon the TW Sloane store which was located right along the railroad tracks in Moapa. Ray said that he was drawn to the store because the building itself looked like an antique all on its own.
“If I remember right, at that time it was the oldest store in Nevada that was still open,” Ray said. “So I went in to take a look.”
Greeting Ray from behind the counter that day was store owner/proprietor, Tom Sloane, himself.
Ray took a look around the store and found a lot of the standard merchandise that would be found in a store at that time. But also on the shelves were a whole collection of much older merchandise.
“He had new stuff on the shelves, but he also had all this antique stuff that had apparently been on his shelves since it was new,” Ray said. “So he and I chatted for a long time and then I ended up with all the stuff here. I bought it from him and I have had it on display in my office, along with a lot of other stuff I found, for a long time.”
Included in the collection were odds and ends of old druggist equipment including books about pharmacoepia, an old mortar and pestle, a kit of small medicine bottles still full of medicine, bottles of liver pills, boxes of blood purifier and a host of similar products for anything that might ail a person around the turn of the 20th century.
There were also various and sundry other items including boot black, a wine barrel auger, a barrel scoop, heavy metal ice tongs, a leather horse brush, coil axle washers, needle sets and more.
Antique bottles of something called Nipisan Spring Water were there, still tightly corked with the water inside. The label reads that this water was bottled from special “medicinal springs” at Deer Lick Springs, California. The directions instruct the user to take four or five liquid ounces three times daily to cure “acne, eczema, rheumatism and chronic ulcers.”
Ray said that, as he has advanced in age, he decided to find a new home for his collections, including these items he had found in Moapa. So he contacted OLSHACS Director Robin Maughan and arranged a donation to the local museum.
“I just figured maybe the museum could use some of this stuff rather than me trying to sell it to some antique guy or something,” Ray said. “And it feels good bringing them back to their home community.”
Maughan said that the museum would be creating a new exhibit to feature these historic items from an old local landmark.
