The pharmacy originally opened as a White Cross Drug Store.
Later it was known as Turner & Tanner Drugs and was
 operated as a partnership between James Clyde
Turner and Earl Henry Tanner.

The 1947 edition of the Huntington City Directory still listed the
 store as Turner & Tanner Drugs, but the 1949 Directory
 listed the store as Tanner’s Pharmacy Inc.,
 and identified Tanner as its president.

For the following decades, Earl Henry Tanner and his wife,
Edith Egnor Tanner, would be the co-owners and
 operators of the pharmacy, while making their
 home in a little white frame house located
 next door to the store building.

Tanner’s was located directly across the street from the
Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Employee Hospital.
 Beginning about 1900, the C&O had two employee
 hospitals — in Clifton Forge, Virginia, and in Huntington.
Many rail workers who saw a physician at the hospital
 and were given a prescription would walk over to
 Tanner’s to have it filled. When the C&O closed
 its hospitals in the 1960s, the pharmacy lost
 that significant piece of business.

The pharmacy was a popular spot with many Marshall University
students who not only shopped there but frequently would
stop in for a sandwich, a cold drink or maybe a bite
 of ice cream. In the 1970s the store was
 re-named Tanners University Pharmacy.

The Tanners closed their pharmacy about 1980.
Today, Tri-State MRI, founded in 1987,
 occupies a new building on the corner site.

Earl Henry Tanner died in 1986 and Edith Egnor Tanner in 2006.