Knoxville Birthplace of Mountain Dew

The name came before the soda. Mountain dew was old slang for whiskey, used in Scots-Irish and Southern speech for moonshine and carried by the 1882 Irish song The Rare Old Mountain Dew. The Hartmans, who had earlier managed an Orange Crush plant in Georgia, made their own lemon-lime mixer after they could not find Natural Setup, the soda they liked with Old Taylor bourbon. They sold it with a hillbilly campaign, and John Brichetto drew labels showing a barefoot mountaineer with a rifle and a moonshine jug.

What the plaque says

Knoxville Birthplace of Mountain Dew Mountain Dew was born right here in Knoxville at 1921 East Magnolia Avenue. This area is the former home of Hartman Beverage, owned and operated by Barney and Ally Hartman. Here in 1948 the brothers created and trademarked the soft drink Mountain Dew as a clear lemon-lime flavored drink. The first franchise for Mountain Dew was issued in 1954 to Charlie Gordon's Tri-City Beverage of Johnson City, Tennessee. In 1958 Tri-City Plant Manager, Bill Bridgeforth, developed a new citrus-lemonade flavor for Mountain Dew, which is the taste of Mountain Dew today. The Tip Corporation of Marion, Virginia, obtained the rights to this formula. William H. "Bill" Jones of the Tip Corporation further refined the formula launching a new version of Mountain Dew in 1961. Three years later in 1964, the Pepsi-Cola Company acquired the production rights to the Mountain Dew brand from the Tip Corporation. Pepsi expanded distribution across the nation, and it became the third biggest soft drink in the U.S. (2020)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 0.6 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Blount Mansion — 1.4 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 16 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• Museum of Appalachia — 17 mi
  John Rice Irwin's 65-acre collection of moved log cabins and mountain objects north of Knoxville, opened in 1969, with a cabin believed to be Mark Twain's father's.

More markers nearby

• Confederate Cemetery — 0.4 mi
• Odd Fellows Cemetery — 0.5 mi
• War on the Home Front (Mabry-Hazen House and Bethel Cemetery) — 0.6 mi
• William Francis Yardley — 0.6 mi