OKEECHOBEE – The safe used by Okeechobee’s first pharmacy, Darrow’s Park Drugs, has a new home in the Okeechobee Museum, 1850 U.S. 98.

 “I walked into Sonny Elliot’s Pawn Shop 27 years ago,” explained Wayne Richbourg, who donated the safe to the museum. He said he knew what is was right away because “THE PARK PHARMACY” is in gold lettering on the safe. “I didn’t want it going anywhere else.”

He said he went right to the bank and withdrew the $400 needed to purchase the 600-pound safe. For the past 27 years, Richbourg used the safe to store family records and valuables.

“I had a heart attack some time back, and I started thinking about that big, heavy safe and what would happen to it,” he explained. “I didn’t want anybody else to ever own it. It’s historic.”

He asked his friend Okeechobee County Clerk of Courts Jerry Bryant for advice. Bryant suggested contacting Magi Cable at the Okeechobee Historical Society. Josh Rhoden of Charlie's Towing transported the heavy safe to the museum.

“This is the place to keep it,” Richbourg said of the museum.

Cable was thrilled to add the safe to the museum’s display about Dr. Anna Darrow and her husband, Dr. Charles Roy Darrow, who were the area’s first doctors and ran the first pharmacy.

Cable said she promised the safe will stay in the museum “until Jesus comes or the building falls down.”

Richbourg also donated a piece of train rail and a railroad switch lantern.

According to the museum display, “Dr. Anna Darrow was the second female physician to be licensed in Florida and incidentally received the highest score ever theretofore recorded. Her story is amazing. Anna and her husband, also a doctor, left a background of big cities to move to Okeechobee City in the summer of 1912. Just getting there from Ft. Pierce was an ordeal.

“Roy worked in the office, and Anna worked everywhere else.

“She treated pioneer settlers, Seminole Indians, and outlaws, setting broken bones and delivering babies – including four sets of twins – in the crudest of circumstances. She traveled by horse and wagon, Model T Ford, by boat and ox cart as well as on foot along primitive trails. She often had to wade.”

A quote from “Dr. Anner” at the museum states: A doctor practicing in the Everglades in the early 20^th Century would have to: "know how to change tires quickly at 4 a.m. and in the freezing rain; set a fractured femur with a piece of string and a flatiron … drive through 10 miles of mud to minister to the child of a drunkard; be able to help with a breech birth on the kitchen table of a farmhouse, with grandma giving the anesthetic and the advice; diagnose tonsillitis from diphtheria, with the nearest  laboratory 48 miles away; and pull the three-pronged fish-hook molar of a 250-pound hired man, aided only by moonshine and faith in God.”