Coca-Cola Bottling Plant Building - Glen Rose, TX
N 32° 14.133 W 097° 45.342
14S E 617234 N 3567223
The former Coca-Cola Bottling Plant Building at 114 Walnut St, Glen Rose, TX, has been converted to other purposes, and today, it is home to La Vita Italian Restaurant, a pretty good place to eat.
Waymark Code: WM12243
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. Inside is a historical marker placed by both the Somervell County Historical Commission and the Glen Rose-Somervell County Chamber of Commerce, flanked by a pair of vintage photographs, and it provides an overview:
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.
The National Register's Registration Form (see Web page, below) provides some fairly lengthy reading (slightly edited):
The Glen Rose Coca Cola Bottling Company Building is the only building in the Glen Rose Downtown Historic District that shows elements of Moderne architectural style. Erected in stages, the single-story building at the corner of West Walnut Street with Northeast Vernon Street was constructed to house the commercial and industrial operations of a soft drink bottling firm. Its eventual exterior colors of white with bright red identified the building with advertising that customers associated with its main product, the Coca Cola beverage. The building is a roughly rectangular structure and
measures 49 feet 11 inches wide and 50 feet 5 inches deep, with a flat roof that drains to the rear. The original construction at the site was a light brown limestone masonry flat-roof building dating from the early twentieth century measuring 20 feet 6 inches wide by 25 feet 11 inches deep. It was set back about 25 feet from West Walnut Street and about 30 feet from Northeast Vernon Street. After the soft drink bottling plant relocated to the stone structure, a concrete block building measuring 20 feet 11 inches wide and 24 feet 10 inches deep was added to the front. The addition was painted white and bore a red-painted inscription "Coca Cola Bottling Co." As business for the enterprise grew, more space was needed, so an addition constructed from bright red ceramic tile blocks with white-painted concrete trim was built across the entire northwest side of the existing structure. At this time a 10-foot by 16-foot wood gable-roof frame addition (with red tile on its northwest side) with beveled wooden siding was built atop the northwest side to house soft-drink beverage syrup canisters from which the liquids flowed by gravity during the bottling process. During this construction the front of the concrete block portion of the building was faced with a veneer of matching bright red ceramic tiles in order to give the entire building a unified exterior appearance.
The Glen Rose Coca Cola Bottling Company Building is a vernacular commercial and industrial building with two adjacent facades facing West Walnut Street. The southeastern of the two front facades, which served the bottling company offices, has a central single glass entrance door and a flanking window opening on each site. These windows originally had steel frames and twenty individual panes of glass, though at some date individual large panes of fixed plate glass took their places. The northwestern facade, which served the bottling machinery area, consists of a single glass entrance door with a wooden sash window on one side and a long, two-part plate glass window above a panel of glass blocks on the other. Across the entire front the owners attached a still mounted lightweight steel sign that originally advertised the Coca Cola product. The southeastern side of the building contains a white-painted concrete block wall with one opening that has been enclosed with larger concrete blocks and an unpainted light brown stone wall with two window openings that have been enclosed with matching stone. The northwestern side facing Northeast Vernon Street has a single wall panel of glass blocks and an enclosed large opening where workers formerly loaded cases of beverages onto trucks and unloaded returned cases with empty recyclable bottles. The second-floor syrup room was built on this end of the building and its end with a ceramic tile wall has a window opening that was filled with glass blocks for natural lighting inside. The rear of the facility contains a red ceramic tile wall with an enclosed opening for truck access that has been fitted with a single door entry for pedestrians and a window opening filled with glass blocks, as well as an unpainted light brown stone wall with one single door and one window opening that has been filled with matching stone.
Many small towns as well as virtually every city in America had soft-drink bottling plants in the years around the turn of the twentieth century, and Glen Rose was no different. At least as early as 1914 the Gresham's Magic Lantern Theater Building (Property #25) on the northeastern side of the courthouse square at 101 Northeast Vernon Street housed one of these plants where the popular Coca Cola beverage was bottled. The facility proved to be inadequate for the purpose and about 1920 the operation shifted to a light brown limestone building on the northeastern side of the square. It was about this time that C.G. Gibbs purchased the bottling plant from the George I. Daniel family. The stone structure proved to be too small for the purpose, so Gibbs added a concrete block addition to its front. In time the business grew to the point that further space was added, at which time during the 1940s the owner constructed a red ceramic tile addition that more than doubled the space inside the plant. After the death of G.C. Gibbs in 1965, his son, Riley Gibbs, managed the bottling company until its sale in 1974. After machinery was removed from the plant, the building became the office for the Gibbs Real Estate and Insurance firm and then was used by a variety of enterprises.