HARDWICK – The Hardwick Walgreens shut its doors in 2024, leaving Hardwick without a pharmacy for the first time in over 150 years. This closure is just one of thousands of other pharmacy closures across the country in recent years, according to the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) aacp.org/article/pharmacy-closures-us,
This has left a critical care gap (see chart) in the Northeast Kingdom, making medications and services harder to access for thousands of people.
Hardwick was served by Cox Pharmacy from 1921 until it was destroyed in 1992 during a large downtown fire. Albert Cox bought his business from his employer Harlan Kimball, who started his first pharmacy in town in 1889.
Brooks added a pharmacy to its store in the shopping center on Route 15 around the same time as the fire, The Brooks became a Rite Aide in 2007, then a Walgreens in 2020.
Though its tenure in Hardwick was the shortest, Walgreens’ four years in town saw Hardwick through the Covid-19 pandemic and two devastating floods.
That Wolcott Street Walgreens never reopened after the 2024 flood and the corporation was beset by multiple lawsuits related to pricing violations, staffing issues and dispensing opioids.
Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital (NVRH) in St. Johnsbury was recently awarded a grant to build pharmacies in Caledonia County. The accompanying maps show Hardwick as a natural choice for this project, given the existing infrastructure and the number of people it would serve.
When the Hardwick Walgreens closed, the maps show that thousands of residents in Hardwick and surrounding towns were left with a drive of over 40 minutes round-trip to the nearest pharmacies in Morrisville, St Johnsbury or Montpelier.
At a February 18 meeting with Sen. Peter Welch at NVRH, Northern Counties Health Care CEO Chris Towne said, “The Hardwick community has been without a pharmacy for quite some time, The closest pharmacy is Morrisville, which is 25 or so minutes away. We have staff who are driving to the pharmacy on a regular basis to pick up prescriptions for patients. If they don’t, it means that they go without the prescriptions.”
A new Hardwick pharmacy would restore better access to essential medical services for over 8,000 people in the area, according to the map. The map shows this as the most beneficial place (caregap.jnu.works) in the northeast of Vermont for a new pharmacy in terms of the number of people served and convenience of access.
The February meeting was the formal announcement that Senator Welch had recently secured $1.4 million through the Congressionally Directed Spending (CDS) process. That award to NVRH will fund the creation of one or more new pharmacies in Caledonia County.
Pharmacies and pharmacists are critical components of the in-person delivery of care and advice to people at a moment when they’re very vulnerable, Welch explained.
NVRH CEO Shawn Tester said, “. . . Pharmacy closures in St. Johnsbury sent a shockwave through our community. . . When the Hardwick pharmacy closed as well, we said, ‘OK this isn’t just the St. Johnsbury problem: this is a Northeast Kingdom problem. How do we leverage the relationship and the support we have through our Senator to meet these needs?’ These funds are going to help solve this problem for our communities and I’m so excited and grateful about that.”
Tester recently said they have not yet determined specific sites for the pharmacies and will share details as planning moves forward.
Even if a pharmacy is restored to Hardwick, AACP shows regional gaps will still remain. Over 20,000 people across Northeast Vermont currently have a 40-minute or longer round trip drive to a pharmacy. While new services in Hardwick will address more than a third of that gap, more rural parts of the Northeast Kingdom will remain underserved; in Caledonia County around Danville and Peacham; in Orleans County around Craftsbury and nearly all of Essex County.
As the closure of the Hardwick Walgreens showed, there’s not a lot of redundancy in the rural care network. While some towns, like Lyndon and Morrisville, can sustain multiple pharmacies, most areas are served by just one critical location, if they are served at all. This is currently true of much of central Orleans County, which relies on the Kinney Drugs in Barton.
Joe Nudell lives in Hardwick, and occasionally volunteers with and contributes to the Hardwick Gazette. He is a senior research engineer in the Computational Policy Lab at Harvard Kennedy School, and at the ADAPPT Lab at NYU, where he uses technology to understand and intervene on complex social issues.
