Dr Pepper, Invented Right Here

In eighteen eighty-five, a pharmacist named Charles Alderton was working the soda fountain at Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store in downtown Waco. He had been experimenting with fruit syrup combinations, trying to reproduce in a glass what he smelled in the drugstore itself, the mingled scents of all the fruit syrups stored in barrels. When he landed on a combination he liked, he offered it to customers who knew it only as a Waco, because that was where you got it.

Wade Morrison, who owned the store, tasted it and recognized something worth keeping. He gave it a name, Dr. Pepper, though historians have never conclusively pinned down why.

Morrison named it, Alderton made it, and customers kept coming back. It was introduced nationally at the nineteen-oh-four Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis, the same world's fair where the ice cream cone is said to have caught on, and it found a national audience immediately. By nineteen-oh-six, the first building in the United States built specifically to bottle Dr Pepper was completed right here in Waco, at the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company.

It produced syrup for another six decades before closing in nineteen sixty-five. That original bottling plant still stands a few blocks from here, now operating as the Dr Pepper Museum. Dr Pepper predates Coca-Cola by a year, a fact that Waco does not let pass quietly.

The formula was invented one year before Atlanta entered the soft drink business, and it happened in a Texas pharmacy the size of a living room.