Quincy: The Town That Got Rich on Coca-Cola

Quincy, Florida was founded in eighteen twenty-eight in the heart of what would become one of America's finest shade tobacco regions. But the story that made Quincy famous happened a century later, during the Great Depression. A local banker named Mark Welch Munroe ran Quincy State Bank and noticed that even in the worst years, people still scraped together a few cents for a Coca-Cola.

He reviewed the company's books, decided it was an extraordinary business, and began urging his customers to buy the stock. Farmers coming in for a two-thousand-dollar loan would leave with four thousand, on the condition they put half into Coca-Cola shares. By the nineteen forties, Quincy reportedly had sixty-seven Coca-Cola millionaires in a town of about four thousand people.

Munroe died in nineteen forty, leaving a million dollars to each of his eighteen children. The dividends kept flowing long after he was gone.