DUANE
Duane's take
The official marker tells this story, and I'm just the one lucky enough to pass it along. Now, you want to talk about humble beginnings, I'll give you humble beginnings. June 10, 1902, right here in Deep Ellum, Dallas.
Three men. One horse. One wagon.
And the first bottle of Coca-Cola this city ever saw. The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Dallas was one of the first companies in the entire nation granted franchise rights to distribute Coca-Cola in bottles. The principal owner was J.T.
Lupton of Chattanooga, Tennessee, who came in with an initial investment of five thousand dollars. Not a fortune, but enough to get the machine runnin'. And what a machine it was.
Hand-operated. Foot-powered. It held exactly two bottles at a time — one beneath the syrup, one under the filling head for the carbonated water, where the bottles were also capped.
Two bottles. That's your operation right there. Three employees handled the whole thing.
R.D. Twinam was the company manager. Mr.
Dixon kept the books. And Fred Welsh — Fred Welsh ran that bottling machine. You imagine Fred, foot pumpin', hands workin', filling two bottles at a time, knowin' he's makin' history and probably wishin' the machine held four.
Now those glass bottles didn't just get filled and forgotten. They were reused, which meant they had to be cleaned. And the way they cleaned them is something worth pausin' on.
You took cleaning fluid, you dropped in steel pellets — similar to gunshot, the marker says — and then you shook those bottles vigorously. That's not a modern automated rinse cycle. That is a man, shakin' a bottle of pellets and cleaning fluid, by hand, one at a time.
Fred Welsh had a full day's work before he ever touched the bottling machine. On that very first day of production, those three men loaded up a one-horse wagon and sold thirty-seven cases. Thirty-seven cases out the gate, delivered right across Dallas.
By 1905, sales had grown enough that the company moved the bottling plant to 1800 Wood Street. The Deep Ellum site had done its job. And from those two-bottle batches shaken and capped in Deep Ellum, something grew.
By the company's centennial in Dallas in 2002, what had started as the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Dallas — later renamed the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of North Texas — had grown to more than twenty-six hundred employees across nineteen locations. Thirty-seven cases on day one. Two thousand six hundred employees a hundred years later.
Fred Welsh, I hope you rested your foot.
What the marker says
Original Site of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Dallas One of the first companies in the nation granted franchise rights for the distribution of Coca-Cola in bottles, the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Dallas produced the city's first bottle of Coca-Cola on this site on June 10, 1902. J.T. Lupton of Chattanooga, Tennessee, was the principal owner, with an initial investment of $5,000. Three employees handled the entire operation. They were: R.D. Twinam, company manager; Mr. Dixon, the bookkeeper; and Fred Welsh, who operated the bottling machine. The employees sold 37 cases on the first day of production and delivered them in a one-horse wagon. In the bottling process, glass Coca-Cola bottles were filled by using a hand-operated, foot-powered machine that held two bottles, one beneath the syrup and the other under the filling head for the carbonated water, where the bottles also were capped. Bottles were reused and had to be hand-washed by putting cleaning fluid and steel pellets, similar to gunshot, into the bottles and shaking them vigorously. By 1905, sales of Coca-Cola had increased such that the company moved the bottling plant to 1800 Wood Street. From its small beginnings here in Deep Ellum, the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Dallas, later renamed the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of North Texas, grew to more than 2,600 employees in 19 locations by its centennial in Dallas in 2002. (2002)