Dixie Coca-Cola Bottling Company Plant
Description and history
The former Dixie Coca-Cola building is located in downtown Atlanta, at the southeast corner of Edgewood Avenue and Courtland Street. It is a relatively small two-story structure, mostly built out of brick, with a projecting wood-frame clapboarded square turret at the corner. The building is irregularly shaped, due in part to the unusual lot on which it stands. Its Edgewood Avenue facade has three large arched windows on the first floor, and Queen Anne-style variety of shapes defining its roof line at and above the second level.
The building was built in 1891, and was from 1900 to 1901 home to the Dixie Coca-Cola Bottling Company, established by Benjamin Franklin Thomas and Joseph Brown Whitehead in 1899 as the exclusive bottler of Coca-Cola for a large part of the United States. Of ten sites definitively established with the early history of Coca-Cola (which was first distributed as a fountain drink from facilities in the city in 1887), it is the only one still standing. Since 1966, it has served as Georgia State University's Baptist Student Center. It had deteriorated in condition by the 1970s, including some loss of its historic integrity, but has since undergone at least an exterior restoration.
Gallery
See also
- List of Coca-Cola buildings and structures
- List of National Historic Landmarks in Georgia (U.S. state)
- National Register of Historic Places listings in Fulton County, Georgia