A Grapico from Gadsden

On our annual pilgrimages to St. George Island, Florida, we usually spend at least part of one day in Apalachicola. The small town is a working seaport with lots of history and charm. Most of the commercial and residential buildings date from the 19th or early 20th centuries. Naturally, the place is also full of shops and galleries, a bookstore, a brewery and such. 

On our most recent visit the week of Thanksgiving, we made our trip into town on Black Friday so our grandson Ezra could see Santa arrive by shrimp boat. Before that we did some shopping at various places including the Apalachicola Sponge Company. There I found the Grapico bottle. 

The drink was first developed and sold by J. Grossman's Sons in New Orleans in 1914. In 1917 a businessman in Birmingham, Raymond R. Rochell, purchased the soft drink's syrup from Grossman's Sons and began distribution in Alabama. By 1929 Rochell had expanded the business beyond Alabama to Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana. He also began distributing Orange Crush in 1926 and 7-Up in 1933. Birmingham's independent Pepsi bottler Buffalo Rock purchased the company in 1981 and continues to distribute Grapico in the southeastern U.S. A Diet Grapico was added to the product line in 2005. 

More comments are below. You can read about some of Birmingham's other early soft drinks here. 

I bought this bottle for $8. Too bad it wasn't a little less; I'd have bought the one from Birmingham also.

Rochell's company became the Orange Crush-Grapico Bottling Company by 1953. The name was shortened to the Orange Grapico Company in July 1957, so this bottle appeared before then at a bottling operation in Gadsden.

The town has special meaning for me since I was born there. My dad was also born there, and we used to visit often until my grandmother died in 1997. 

The Orange Crush, 7-Up and Grapico bottling company in Birmingham in the 1940's. 

Photo by O.V. Hunt

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections 

"Older than dirt but a whole lot sweeter" says the company's web site. 

Old Alabama Stuff (9): Sandwiches & Soda in Birmingham in 1906

Back in October 2015 I posted an entry on Gunn's Pharmacy in my "Birmingham Photo of the Day" series. The BhamWiki article for that business included that ca. 1915 photograph but also one from the interior taken from an article in American Druggist & Pharmaceutical Record Volume 52, Jan-Jun 1908. I decided to take a look at the entire article and found it on Google Books. That article is included below, along with larger versions of two photos taken inside Jacob's Pharmacy. Let's take a closer look.

The article covers both some general and specific aspects of the drug store trade in Birmingham at the time. Between 40 and 50 such stores were operating in the city depending on the ups and downs of the local economy. Five of these stores are discussed: Parker's, Patton-Pope Drug Company, Gunn & Gambill, Jacob's and Collier's. Although pharmaceuticals and such provide good income, "they are secondary considerations" to the soda fountain food and drinks also offered. At Parker's, just purchased by Gunn & Gambill, a large newstand was also available.

Many of the places served sandwiches, "...all made by the same person, a woman who gets telephone orders at night and delivers the goods next morning through a corps of little boys. Only one kind is sold. It is a turkey sandwich with a pungent dressing somewhat resembling chili sauce, and is distinctly good. Each sandwich is wrapped in a waxed paper and is served in this paper on a saucer, without knife or fork. At the most carefully tended fountain the attendant partially unwrapped the sandwich so that it lay on the plate with the paper beneath, but ready to the hand of the customer. In the others the package was thrown down in any sort of fashion on the saucer. The sandwiches cost six cents delivered, and sell at ten cents each." 

The soda man at one of the successful stores noted how sandwichs brought in customers during slow times. Busy times included lunch hours between noon and 2 and then after the nearby theaters released their patrons. At the busy times store menus were taken up so customers would not waste time perusing them.

The soda fountain in Parker's extended the full length of the store and had 26 tables in addition to the counter space. Three adult men and three or four boys available during the busy times worked the fountain. 

Considerable space in the article is devoted to Jacob's Pharmacy with it's brand new "thirty foot soda counter" and fixtures. The store also featured a private room on the upper level for the fitting of trusses used for hernia patients. Jacob's heavily promoted this business, promising to refund the travel expenses for any patient who could not be properly fitted.

The anonymous author of this piece engages in a bit of wistful editorializing at the end. "We have consistently decried the commercialization of pharmacy, and cannot but view with regret the extent to which commercialism has gone in the introduction of the restaurant feature, but...it is a condition and not a theory which confronts us, and it cannot but prove interesting to other druggists in the United States to know the methods which are being pursued by the Yankees of the South who live in Birmingham."

A fascinating article "The Heyday of Drugstores in Alabama" by James Kuykendall can be found in the January 1987 issue of the Alabama Review.

Birmingham's National Dope Company & Other Early Soft Drink Bottlers

In the first half of the 20^th century Birmingham was home to several soft drink companies bottling such exotic drinks as Gay-Ola, Rye-Ola and Wiseola. At his Kola Wars site noted below, researcher Dennis Smith declares, “No city in the country had the number of brand name and proprietary soft drinks that were produced in the city of Birmingham prior to 1920.” With the help of the BhamWiki and Antique-Bottles.net web sites, I’d like to bring together some information on a few of these companies and their products.

Bottled drinks appeared in Alabama soon after the Civil War.  “Red Sulphur Water” was sold in blue bottles in the 1870s by the Blount Springs Natural Sulphur Water Bottling Company. The firm operated at the mineral springs resort north of Birmingham; the product was sold to guests and passengers on the resort’s trains. Bottles were also shipped elsewhere in Alabama and into Tennessee as well.

An early Birmingham soft drink drink formula, Celery-Cola, was developed by businessman James Mayfield in 1887. Beginning in the 1880s Mayfield partnered with John Pemberton, the patent medicine inventor whose products included Coca-Cola. He also worked as general manager for T.J. Eady’s real estate, banking and manufacturing businesses as well as the Wine Coca Company. Mayfield later developed oil wells in Kentucky and Tennessee and opened offices to sell drink syrup rights to bottlers all over the United States, Cuba and South America until the Great Depression killed his final efforts in that field.

                                    

In 1899 Mayfield and a partner opened J.C. Mayfield Manufacturing Company on Morris Avenue and the Celery-Cola Company operated from there until 1910. In 1906 Congress passed the first consumer legislation, the Pure Food and Drug Act, which allowed the federal government to require product labels giving ingredients and amounts. Unfortunately, Mayfield’s Celery-Cola contained high levels of caffeine and cocaine, two of the substances the government could regulate. The Pure Food and Drug Administration took Mayfield to court and won; he had to close the business. In 1911, however, he was in St. Louis operating as the Koke Company; Coca-Cola sued for trademark infringement and finally won a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1920. He continued marketing other drinks from St. Louis into the 1930s.

Another local chemist and drink entrepreneur was Jefferson J. Peek and his Peek Beverage Company.  He opened his company in 1905; his offices were in the original Watt Building downtown with a bottling operation next door.  The 1910 U.S. Census shows Peek living on 28^th Street with his wife Mary and two sons. His occupation is listed as “manufacturer Kola syrup.” Peek created such brands as Rye-Ola, Wiseola and Nervola before selling the firm in 1918. The new owners had to close the business, by then located in Southside, in 1922.

Rye-Ola bottle



 Watts Building, 20^th St.& 3^rd Avenue North, demolished 1927                       
                                 

 The National Dope Company produced and bottled soft drinks in Birmingham from 1909 to 1911. “Dope” was a slang term for carbonated soft drinks with cola syrup that seems to have been used primarily in the southern U.S. into the 1950s.

Source: Antique-Bottles.net Forum
http://www.antique-bottles.net/forum/National-Dope-Company-m131612.aspx

 Other local soft drinks in this time period included Ozo-Olo and Gay-Ola. Both drinks were among the many Coca-Cola imitators of the day. Gay-Ola was sold by J.C. Wells’ Gleeola Company, which opened on 18^th Street South in 1910. By June of the following year the company was producing 40,000 gallons of syrup a month and expanding aggressively as far as Florida, Texas and California. Lawsuits eventually won by Coca-Cola forced the company to make changes, but a version of the drink remained on the market into the 1920s. 

In 1938 local businessman A.G. Gaston founded the Brown Belle Bottling Company and created such drinks as Joe Louis Punch and Brown Bell Boogie. The firm operated until 1950, but had trouble finding sales outlets and mounting debts. Gaston finally paid those debts himself.



Many other producers and bottlers of soft drinks operated in Birmingham before World War II. The entire history of soft drinks is fascinating, and Birmingham has played an important role in that story.  

All images are from BhamWiki.com unless otherwise noted.

More Information

BhamWiki: List of Bottlers
http://www.bhamwiki.com/w/List_of_bottlers

Blount Springs Natural Sulphur Water Bottling Company
http://www.southernbottles.com/files/bountSpring.html

History & Timeline of Soft Drinks
http://inventors.about.com/od/sstartinventions/a/soft_drink.htm

Smith, Dennis. Birmingham Bottlers, 1883-1983. Birmingham: privately published, 1983

Smith, Dennis I. Celery-Cola and James C. Mayfield. http://www.southernbottles.com/Pages/Mayfield/Mayfield.html

Smith, Dennis. Kola Wars: Birmingham
http://kolawars.com/blank.html