La Vita Italian Restaurant Coca-Cola Sign - Glen Rose, TX
N 32° 14.136 W 097° 45.345
14S E 617228 N 3567229
While the vintage sign for La Vita Italian Restaurant encourages you to drink Coca-Cola, the entire building is a piece of memorabilia, a former Coca-Cola bottling plant located at 114 Walnut St, Glen Rose, TX.
Waymark Code: WM1223E
Location: Texas, United States
Date Posted: 02/06/2020
Views: 4
This building is a contributing building to the Glen Rose Downtown Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. You can see this sign at all hours of the day, and it reads:
La Vita Italian
Restaurant
254-898-2371
Enjoy Coca-Cola
Trade mark ®
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For best results, though, make time to have lunch or dinner here to get a peek inside. The restaurant is fairly spartan, but there are some bits and pieces of Coca-Cola memorabilia, including a row of old bottles across a ceiling beam, and there are some vintage photos of the bottling plant from back in the day. A sign on the wall provides some history:
In 1928 Grover C. Gibbs, Sr. bought the existing Coca-Cola business along with accumulated indebtedness. To pay off the debts, he and his older sons cut and sold 200 loads of wood in about six months time.
Mr. Gibbs built and moved into the first part of this building in 1932. The original equipment consisted of a foot-powered bottling machine and a Model-T Ford delivery truck. Later in 1946, he expanded the plant and added the brick veneer, the second story serving as a syrup room which used gravity flow to the fillers. In time, he updated the equipment with an automatic processing machine that sealed and capped the Cokes.
Glen Rose long held the distinction of being the smallest city in the world having a Coca-Cola bottling plant, and at one time was hailed as the heaviest consumer of Coke on a per capita basis. Yes, Glen Rose had its name on the bottom of Coke bottles just like the rest of the nation's Cokes!
All nine Gibbs children and several grandchildren worked in the plant, keeping the area's stores and schools supplied with Coca-Cola for over forty years. When it closed in 1974, The familiar sounds of bottles moving, empty or full, and the wooden cases being stacked was indeed missed by the locals.
[Somervell County Historical Commission; Glen Rose-Somervell County Chamber of Commerce]
Are you a Coca Cola Collector?: no
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I have a beautiful vintage plate of a young lady, sipping a Coke while fishing.
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