Pocahontas Beverages

If you have never heard of the town of Pocahontas, VA then I’m not surprised. When the Appalachian Coal boom started Pocahontas was ground zero with it’s unusually high coal seam. This little backwoods town exploded into a boom town, and of course every growing town needs a soda bottling company. While there are earlier bottlers in Pocahontas’ history one individual stands out, Nick Crist. Crist opened his Pocahontas Bottling Works operation on a small scale in 1919, equipped with a foot operated bottling machine and a wagon, which he used to deliver his sodas himself, he created a bottling business which would spend fifty years serving the coal fields of Southwest Virginia and Southern West Virginia. Throughout it’s history the company would bottle brands such as Nu-Grape, Canada Dry's Carlton Club, Spur Cola, Double Cola, Nesbitts Orange, Sunny Isles Pineapple Soda, and Sun Drop among other brands.

Of course this article isn’t about the bottling company itself, or the man, but it is actually about the Pocahontas Beverages line which it appears the company created around 1935 after Crist renamed his Nick Crist Pale Dry Ginger Ale to Pocahontas Club Ginger Ale, and produced a 7oz green embossed neck bottle for the drink. With the bottling company name being the Pocahontas Bottling Company I’m sure that they were bottling a flavor line which would be the true origins of the brand; however, the Pocahontas Club bottle is the first evidence of the name used as branding. The earliest acl bottle I have found is from 1947 and is from the period when the company was bottling Canada Dry's Spur Cola, thus calling itself the Spur Bottling Company. These early acls for the brand are a deco bottle with an applied color label and are usually 7 ½ ounces with red lettering on a white background.

The centerpiece of the label is the side profile picture of the Native American Princess Pocahontas who figures prominently in the marketing of the town, and coal company that shares her name. Of course Pocahontas is deeply ingrained in the history and legend of Virginia itself. She was the daughter of Powhatan the chief of a group of thirty Algonquin speaking tribes in tidewater Virginia. John Smith, who was among the colonists of Jamestown, was captured by Powhatan’s brother’s hunting party and was to be executed, but Pocahontas intervened on his behalf. The story has been told over and over again, and is also debated among historians as to it’s authenticity. Needless to say the legend of Pocahontas inspired the name of the town, and beverage line that sprang from it.

After the company moved from Pocahontas, VA to it’s new plant in neighboring Falls Mills they updated the label on the Pocahontas Beverages bottles. They still use the deco design of the earlier bottles; however, now have a red  & white acl on a clear background. This bottle is dated 1951 and is labeled property of the Nesbitt Bottling Company of Falls Mills, VA. By 1953 a 10 ounce bottle has been added to the line and uses a different deco type style with a new all white ACL design. They are still bottling the 7 ½ ounce size that by 1963 has dropped the deco aspects in favor of a straight side design with all white acl and the portrait of Pocahontas has been applied to the shoulder as well as the main body label. This is the form that the label will take on all of the sizes of Pocahontas Beverages bottles from this point forward. The next step seems to happen in 1965 when the brand is moved to a 16 ounce size bottle. These 16 ounce bottles are the most common form of this bottle that can be found; however, I have identified at least seven variations of this bottle, most of which can be seen on my page dedicated to the Pocahontas Bottling Works on my website www.tazewell-orange.com. The 16 ounce  bottle would be the standard bottle for the brand from 1965 until the closing of the bottling company after the death of Nick Crist sometime after 1982, which is the newest Pocahontas Beverages bottle I have found.

If you are interested in collecting some of these then maybe some advice is warranted. I’ve been collecting from this area for going on five years, and while some of these bottles are easy to find in the area, the 16 ounces, others have proven more difficult. The toughest one to find for me was the 1963 7 ½ ounce, I ended up purchasing one off eBay from Indiana. That’s a long way for a Pocahontas bottle to travel. The deco style 7 ½ ounce bottles are a tougher find, but are the more desirable bottles from the brand. My personal favorite is the 1953 10 ounce deco/ACL which is a tougher find than the 7 ½ ounce bottles, but well worth the effort, it is the best of these bottles. There isn’t much in the way of advertising for this brand, there are brand specific crates with white lettering on a blue background that have been showing up on eBay recently. Unfortunately there are no brand specific bottle caps for this brand as the company used generic flavor caps with the company information on the skirt. Truly a shame as the profile of Pocahontas would have made for a nice looking cap. You can read more about the company in the Pocahontas VA section of my site.

1935 Pocahontas Club bottle.

1947 Pocahontas Beverages bottle.

1951 Pocahontas Beverages Bottle.

1953 10oz Pocahontas Beverages bottle.

1960 7 1/2oz Pocahontas Beverages bottle.

16oz Pocahontas Beverages bottle.

Pocahontas Beverages crate.

A cola brand of their own: a brief history of Kroger's Wescola.

Back in the early 1990’s I used to work for my local Kroger Grocery store as a bag boy. One of my duties was to go to the back and work the returned bottles. Yes we were still using returnable bottles in the early 90’s. Little did I know that this experience would come back to me later in life as a bottle collector. What was an annoying job now fascinates me. Of course the connection to Kroger would rear its head while some friends and I were digging in a dump a couple of years back. We happened upon several Wescola deco style bottles and our only clue to who produced them was the embossing on the bottom “Wesco Foods Cincinnati Ohio”. Figuring they have come in via train from there I didn’t think much of them; however, I got curious one day and looked up the company. It turns out that Wesco Foods was a branch of the Kroger Grocery Company, and that Wescola was Kroger’s attempt at creating their own cola brand.

Wescola was part of the Kroger Latonia Club line which would evolve into today’s Big K line of soft drinks. The majority of the Latonia Club line was actually paper label straight side bottles with very few surviving into modern day; however, Wescola for some reason was different. Kroger produced a specially designed embossed deco bottle for the brand. Deco bottles were a type of bottle that was popular during the 1920’s into the 1950’s and would either be embossed with some pattern or have its own unique shape. Wescola was the latter. The brand seems to have started being produced around 1937, which corresponds with the dates on the bottles themselves. The advertising of the time noted that it was their “new cola drink”. Unfortunately although the name shows up a lot from 1937 until the late 1940’s in their advertising, I’ve only found one actual ad that pictures the bottles themselves.

Early Latonia Club 24oz Lime Rickey paper label label.

8oz Wescola deco bottle dated 1937.

Wescola bottle cap from Detroit Michigan. Wesco Foods had three different branches which included Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati Ohio.

Big K Cola as it exists today, I wonder if this is the same formula as Wescola after all these years.

Fading signs that I have found in my research.

As I search for the locations of these long gone bottlers, I happen upon some ghosts from their vibrant past. These come in the form of painted wall signs and many of them can be interesting. Here are some that I have found so far and where I found them.

This is the wall of the Jones Vance Drug Company in Johnson City, Tennessee.

Just across the street from the Jones Vance building is this sign which was partially covered by another smaller building until a few years ago.

To give you a sense of age of this particular sign here is a photo showing the newly built building that helped preserve the bottom part of the sign, as you can tell from the cars this sign is quite early.

This is a sign just off of State Street in downtown Bristol, VA. I would love to see this one restored. It's huge!

Also in Bristol is this newer Enjoy Coke sign, even a sign this new is in danger of fading into history.

This sign is on a store in an area of Tazewell County Virginia known as Baptist Valley. You don't often see Upper 10 painted wall signs.

On the other side of the same building is this RC cola sign, you can even see the older sign ghosting through the present paint.

This is a store just outside the town of Tazewell, VA. Like the Baptist Valley sign there is ghosting from an earlier sign showing through the present sign.

It's one thing to find national brands such as Coke, Pepsi, or RC, but it is an entirely different thing to find a local brand painted on a wall. This is Rhythm Punch a grape soda produced only by the Sun Rise Bottling Company which was located in Tazewell, VA. This sign is on both sides of the building shown above.

Below that sign was this metal 7-up sign long since rusted into oblivion.

Now this is an interesting ghost sign indeed from Pocahontas, VA. For some reason there is a part of the building that is either missing or the sign extended out from the building. It was covered up by another building for a long time and that building is now gone revealing this.

As I was prowling around a road just outside of Princeton, WV, I ran upon this sign on the side of this long shuttered store. There wasn't really enough room to get off the road properly.

Very near the railroad depot in Princeton, WV is this sign. I wish I could read the rest of the sign, but very little remains aside from the obvious.

K. B. Co. embossed on the bottom, the bottles from the Keystone Bottling Company of West Virginia

The Keystone Bottling Company, whose principal office was located in Keystone, West Virginia, was incorporated on February 2, 1907. The stockholders of the company was C. S. Angel of North Fork W. VA, C. C. Hale of Keystone, VA, C. W. Elliot of North fork, W. VA, W. E. Stuart of Keystone, W. VA, and T. W. Zink of Keystone, W. VA. This company was comprised of a group of bottlers with branches in Keystone, W. VA, Welch, W. VA, Williamson, W. VA, North Fork, W. VA, and finally Bluefield, W. VA. The main product of this bottling group was Coca-Cola, and would add Nu-Grape in the middle 1920’s. This bottling group identified its bottles not by using a town name on them, except in certain cases, but by using the initials K. B. Co. which is usually located on the bottom of the bottles including their Coca-Cola Bottles. The company would be renamed the Northfork Coca-Cola Bottling Company by the late 1920’s, and would create a bottler in Rock, W. VA known as the Rock Mineral Springs Bottling Company.

Thanks to the good folks at Coca-Cola in Bluefield WV, I now have a photo of the C. W. Elliot Company of Northfork, WV. This building was also the corporate offices of the Keystone Bottling Company group.

1913 Coca-Cola Soda Water bottle from the Keystone Bottling Company.

1916 Coca-Cola bottle from the Keystone Bottling Company

1923 C. C. Soda Water from the Bluefield Bottling Company which was part of the Keystone Bottling Company

1924 C. C. Soda Water from the Flat Top Bottling Company of Welch, WVA which was part of the Keystone Bottling Company

November 16, 1915 patented hobble skirt Coca-Cola bottle from the Keystone Bottling Company

1927 deco bottle from the Bluefield Bottling Company

1930 Big Bottle from the C. W. Elliot Company of Northfork, WVA which was part of the now named Northfork Coca-Cola Bottling Company.

1937 Big Bottle from the Welch Coca-Cola Bottling Company, former Flat Top Bottling Company, of Welch, WVA which is also part of the Northfork Coca-Cola Bottling group.

Dixie Beverages bottle from Northfork, WVA, which is most likely part of the company as well.

 And that's all of them I hope you enjoyed the bottles from the Keystone / Northfork Coca-Cola Bottling Company bottling group.

Bottles from Roanoke, VA

Roanoke had quite a few bottlers over the years, and several Roanoke based brands such as Lemon Kola, King Cola, 3-C Nectar, and Dixie-Ola. Unfortunately none of them survived to the modern day; however, the evidence of their existence still survives in the form of bottles and other go with items. Here are just a few of them.

The Roanoke Bottling & Cider Company would eventually become the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company of Roanoke, VA according to James C. Ayers' Pepsi=Cola book.

King Cola was a Roanoke based drink during the late teens. They were sued by Coca-Cola and lost.

3-C Nectar was created by the Columbia Chemical Corporation (get it?) in the early 1920's and within three years was out of business. The brand was bottled as far away as Philadelphia, PA and Coney Island, NY.

Dixie-Ola was created around 1928 by the Roanoke Extract & Bottling Company.

A cap from the company found in Mouth of Wilson, VA, it may be possible that they bottled the brand at some point or just purchased the company's bottle cap stock after they went out of business.

Two Orange Crush bottles from the 1930's.

Mid 1930's Dr. Swett's Root Beer from Roanoke, VA

A late 1930's Pop Kola marked "the property of L. L. Rice" who later owned Rice's Bottling Company; however, by this point his company was known as the Big Bill Bottling Company.

Grapette from Rice's Bottling Company of Roanoke, VA. Lawrence L. Rice would open up branch plants in Johnson City, Tennessee, and Jacksonville, Florida.

1940 Pop Kola bottle from Rice's Bottling Company of Roanoke, VA

A Clicquot Club Beverages bottle from the 1950's. I don't know much about the company that bottled this one.

A 1959 Pepsi Cola bottle from Roanoke, VA. Knowing that L. L. Rice owned the Johnson City, Tenn. Pepsi Cola bottling company, I wonder if he owned the company in Roanoke, VA as well.

Frankie's Beverages bottle from the Frankie's Bottling Company of Roanoke, VA. According to the information given me by one of the owner's relatives, this company is the same one that was bottling the Orange Crush bottles pictured above.

You don't see too many of these mid 60's with town names, but here is one from the Double Cola Bottling Company of Roanoke, VA.

Oak Lane Dairy opened in Roanoke, VA in 1935, which is about the right time period for this early ACL (Applied Color Label) Mission Orange drink bottle.

Still don't know the source of this 1941 Fruit Beverage Company bottle from Roanoke, VA; however, it could be associated with the Mission above or the Bireley's below. All three would have been non-carbonated fruit flavored drinks.

There is a photo of downtown Roanoke, VA out there with a billboard ad for Bireley's Orange Drink, and here is the bottle.