Historical Marker
Johnson City Home of Mountain Dew
Johnson City, Washington County · Tennessee
Mountain Dew began as a bar mixer in Knoxville, created by bottlers Barney and Ally Hartman in the 1940s and trademarked in 1948. Johnson City's part came a decade later, when its Tri-Cities Beverage Corporation reworked the clear lemon-lime drink into a citrus-lemonade flavor in 1958. The Tip Corporation of Marion, Virginia, acquired the rights and refined the formula in 1961, and Pepsi bought the brand in 1964. Accounts differ on who first formulated it, and one article has asked who should claim the drink as its own hometown product.
What the plaque says
Johnson City Home of Mountain Dew This is the former site of the Tri-City Beverage Corporation, of which Charles O. Gordon was the owner-president. In 1954 the Tri-City Beverage became one of the first to bottle "Mountain Dew", a clear lemon-lime flavored drink. Four years later Plant Manager Bill Bridgeforth developed a new citrus-lemonade flavored drink called Tri-City Lemonade. In 1960 he placed his citrus-lemonade flavor into the Mountain Dew bottles, which is the flavor in Mountain Dew today. The rights to this formula were obtained by William H. "Bill" Jones of the Tip Corporation of Marion, Virginia, in 1961. Three years later in August 1964, the Mountain Dew brand and production rights were acquired from Tip by the Pepsi-Cola Company, now known as PepsiCo Corporation, at which point distribution expanded across the United States and is the third-biggest refreshment beverage in the U.S. In 2012 the PepsiCo Corporation introduced a new Mountain Dew called "Johnson City Gold" and is the only Pepsi product known to carry the name of a U.S. city.
Where it stands
36.30842, -82.36177 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Jonesborough Historic District — 6.1 miTennessee's oldest town, chartered in 1779, where Elihu Embree printed The Emancipator in 1820 and a hay wagon by the courthouse started the National Storytelling Festival in 1973.
- Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park — 6.5 miA shoal on the Watauga River where the Transylvania Company bought about 20 million acres from the Cherokee in March 1775, Dragging Canoe refused, and the Overmountain Men mustered in 1780.
- Rocky Mount Museum — 6.9 miWilliam Cobb's log house at Piney Flats, where Governor William Blount ran the Southwest Territory from 1790 to 1792, now a living-history museum set in 1791 with a reconstructed cabin for the enslaved.
- Unicoi County Heritage Museum and the Erwin Rail Yard — 10.0 miA museum in the old fish hatchery superintendent's house in Erwin, a Clinchfield railroad town where the elephant Mary was hanged in 1916 and Black residents were driven out in 1918.