Finance History | 256 Middle Street — Brad's Drink Became a Named Cola

People treat PepsiCo as a Purchase campus that later sat in the S and P 500.

The name was written on this corner.

In 1893 Caleb Davis Bradham, a pharmacist who had left medical school when his father's business failed, began serving a sweet carbonated mix at his drugstore on Middle and Pollock Streets in New Bern, North Carolina.

Customers called it Brad's Drink.

On 28 August 1898 he renamed the fountain soda Pepsi-Cola, selling a digestive cola rather than a patent medicine.

The claimed root of the name is dyspepsia plus the kola nut, not a documented pepsin formula.

Bradham incorporated the Pepsi-Cola Company under North Carolina law in December 1902 and left the fountain counter to sell syrup.

The United States registered the Pepsi-Cola trademark on 16 June 1903.

By 1904 the company reported nearly 20,000 gallons of syrup sold that year.

Bottling franchises followed in 1905.

Sugar prices after the First World War wrecked the first company.

Bradham sold the trademark, and later owners rebuilt the brand.

The original drugstore on this lot burned shortly before Bradham died in 1934.

A later building now holds a public soda fountain and plaques at 256 Middle Street.

The mechanism is a fountain recipe turned into a trademarked syrup that other towns bottled under contract.

The S and P 500 ticker still traces to a corner pharmacy that charged for a glass and then sold the concentrate.

Photo: Andrew Gnias, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Pharmacy facade: Indy beetle, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Plaque: RadioFan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.