This corner shop in Alexandria houses the Stabler-Leadbeater Apothecary Shop/Museum, its shelves still stocked with history. Here a devout Quaker and savvy businessman, Edward Stabler, rented space in 1792 at the corner of King and S. Fairfax to start his business. By 1796 he was renting 107 S. Fairfax; nine years later he took ownership of the building and turned it into a bustling apothecary.
By 1829 he had purchased 105 S. Fairfax and incorporated that building into his operation. For generations this Quaker family owned and ran the shop, selling to a variety of city and country residents — from Martha Washington to Robert E. Lee. The Great Depression brought a dramatic decline in sales that forced the shop to close, and almost immediately, in 1939, it reopened as a museum.
Today most of the artifacts inside the shop are authentic and date to its closing. The building itself was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2021. Notice the authentic bottles and jars still on the shelves, each one carrying its own trace of the shop's long decades of business.