Original site of the Houston Coca-Cola Bottling Company

The primary owner this plaque names worked from Chattanooga. John Thomas Lupton, born near Winchester, Virginia, in 1862, took a law degree at the University of Virginia and settled in Chattanooga in 1887, where his first law partner was William Gibbs McAdoo. In 1899 he joined Benjamin Thomas and Joseph Whitehead in the contract with Asa Candler that gave them bottling rights for most of the country. When the partners divided the territory in 1900, Lupton and Whitehead took the South and much of the West, setting up parent companies to franchise local bottlers.

What the plaque says

Original site of the Houston Coca-Cola Bottling Company Original site of the Houston Coca-Cola Bottling Company The Houston Coca-Cola Bottling Company, one of the first companies in the nation granted franchise rights for the distribution of Coca-Cola in bottles, opened its doors in a brick building on this site in 1902. J.T. Lupton of Chattanooga, Tennessee, was the primary owner. The initial purchase of syrup from the Coca-Cola Company consisted of 387 gallons of syrup, and bottled Coca-Cola was delivered by a mule-drawn wagon. In 1908, the company bought almost 3,000 gallons of syrup to meet the soda demand, which was growing along with Houston's population. In this location, they had one hand-operated bottling machine with a capacity of 250 cases a day. By 1915, sales of Coca-Cola had increased such that the company moved to larger facilities at 1212 Washington Avenue. In 1918, J.E. Evans became the plant's general manager, and during his tenure Houstonians continued to celebrate the soft drink sensation, prompting the company's continued growth. By 1948, C. Lupton Thomas, general manager, and J.E. Evans, president, developed plans for a new facility at 2800 Bissonnet. Lauded as the world's most modern Coca-Cola plant, the new million-dollar plant opened to the public in June 1950. For more than a century, the Houston Coca-Cola Bottling Company has provided jobs, as well as refreshment, to the City of Houston and surrounding areas. The company has consistently given back to the city through charity work and project funding. As one of the largest operations of its kind in the world, it continues its commitment to employees, customers and neighbors. (2003)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 0.7 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 2.2 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Rothko Chapel — 2.3 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Emancipation Park — 2.3 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.

More markers nearby

• Anson Jones — 0.4 mi
• Caspar Braun — 0.4 mi
• The Rev. William M. Tryon — 0.5 mi
• Belle Sherman Kendall — 0.5 mi