If soft drinks are a passion or you’ve looked for unique travel destinations for the kids, you are probably aware of the World of Coca-Cola next to the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. There are at least two other venues in the USA that honor soft drinks, though they may be unknown to most Americans.
The Dr Pepper Museum & Free Enterprise Institute is in Waco, Texas, and the Dorothy Molter Museum — which celebrates root beer — is about a two-hour drive north of Duluth near the Canadian border in Ely, Minnesota.
The Dr Pepper Museum declares it’s the home of the nation’s “oldest major soft drink.” The museum is in the building where the soda was bottled, the 1906 Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company building, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as the “Home of Dr Pepper.” The soda’s current manufacturer, Keurig Dr Pepper, does not own or operate the museum.
According to Dr Pepper Snapple, which merged July 9 with Keurig Green Mountain to become Keurig Dr Pepper, the soda was originally made in Morrison’s Old Corner Drug Store in Waco, and its unique flavor was an immediate hit when it was first sold in 1885. The drug store, located a few blocks away from the bottling building, was destroyed in a 1953 tornado. A sidewalk marker commemorates the location as the place where Dr Pepper was invented and those who died in the tornado.
“Wade Morrison, the drug store owner, named it ‘Dr. Pepper’ after Dr. Charles Pepper, a Virginia doctor who was the father of a girl Morrison was once in love with,” Dr Pepper Snapple says. “Dr Pepper was introduced to millions of visitors at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where it was an instant success. Other major food products introduced at the exposition included the ice cream cone, hot dog rolls and hamburger buns.”
In 1988, the Dr Pepper Company donated the museum building at the corner of Waco’s Fifth Street and Mary Avenue. The building had been in disrepair in a neighborhood comprised mostly of abandoned warehouses. The museum says it has also received contributions from Coca-Cola and numerous independent soft drink bottlers and is the “only nonprofit museum in the country dedicated to the entire soft drink industry.”
The citizens who started the museum “had several goals,” says Mary Beth Farrell, the museum’s spokeswoman. “First and foremost, they wanted to save the building, which was designed by a famous local architect Milton Scott and built in 1906 specifically for the purposes of bottling Dr Pepper. The site was chosen because of its access to a natural artesian well as a water source. The restored building and well are the most popular artifacts for visitors.”
Dr Pepper’s origin is similar to those of many other popular soft drinks, Farrell says, so the museum uses Dr Pepper as an example while telling the story of the entire soft drink industry. Many artifacts of 7up, which is owned by Keurig Dr Pepper, are also on display.
The museum has welcomed about 1.8 million visitors since opening in May 1991 and expects about 150,000 this year, according to museum officials. When it opened, the museum’s collection of artifacts totaled about 1,600. Today, there are more than 300,000.
The museum is also the home of the W. W. Clements Free Enterprise Institute. The institute was created in 1997 to educate school children and adults “about the economic system that underlies American life.” The soft drink industry is used as a model to teach students about developing, producing and marketing products.
Throughout Dr Pepper’s long history, many people have debated what it tastes like, including some who insist that prune juice is an ingredient.
“I have worked here for 14 years and still don’t have the words to do it justice,” says Farrell who prefers Dr Pepper 10, the soda’s 10-calorie version. “The best I can do is say that it’s a sweet, spicy taste like no other.”
On its website, the museum addresses the prune juice issue.
“There is no prune juice (or ever was) in Dr Pepper,” the museum states. “We believe the rumor was started by a comment by Bob Hope when he was visiting the Waco area at one time. According to Dr Pepper/Seven Up headquarters, Dr Pepper is a unique blend of natural and artificial flavors; it does not contain prune juice.”
In Ely, Minnesota, about 1,300 miles north of the Dr Pepper museum, the Dorothy Molter Museum honors a “Root Beer Lady.”
Molter became owner of a fishing resort on a small remote island, the Isle of Pines, on Knife Lake in Superior National Forest in 1948 and later made and bottled homemade root beer. Between 1976 and 1986, Molter and her helpers brewed an average of more than 10,000 bottles of root beer per summer, the museum’s website says.
“Although the consistency of her root beer was sometimes off, depending on the length of fermentation time or how long it cooled in the ice house, visitors to her island were often paddlers who had been camping for days and rejoiced in the opportunity to drink something other than iodine-flavored lake water,” the website says.
The museum, according to executive director Jess Edberg, displays Molter’s root beer-making equipment in the Winter Cabin, one of Molter’s three log cabins brought to Ely after she died in 1986. On display are many soda pop bottles, labels and caps; wooden crates from 7up, A&W and Kist; boxes of root beer extract and yeast packets; mixing crocks and boiling pans; Molter’s Coca-Cola chest cooler, and many photographs of her making root beer.
