Vintage NOS Cherry Smash Bottle Cap 🍒 Richmond & Arlington, Virginia 1960s

Remember Cherry Smash? 🍒 Vintage NOS 1960s Bottle Cap, Richmond & Arlington, Virginia

Size: 1 1/4"

🍒 Original NOS vintage Cherry Smash bottle cap from the 1960s, unused and never crimped, so it measures 1 1/4" across like every uncrimped crown. A grinning boy in a three-cornered hat up top (hard not to think of young George Washington and that cherry tree), CHERRY SMASH in big white letters on a red band, Reg. U.S. Pat. Off., and the recipe right on the cap: Carbonated water, cane sugar, cherry and other natural flavors, citric acid. Around the skirt: Added art. color, 1/20 of 1% sodium benzoate, with the crown maker's little mark. Inside, a plastic liner.

🏭 "Our Nation's Beverage"

John E. Fowler came up with Cherry Smash in Richmond, Virginia, in 1901, a cherry syrup the soda jerks mixed with fizzy water and poured over ice cream. It grew into one of the biggest soda brands in the country, billed as "Our Nation's Beverage" and remembered as second only to Coca-Cola. When Prohibition shut down the Arlington Brewing Company on the Potomac in Rosslyn, Fowler bought the old brewery in 1920 and moved Cherry Smash in, and he made and sold it up and down the East Coast for about thirty years.

Around 1950 Fowler sold the business, and the new Cherry Smash Company, Inc., "successors to John E. Fowler," franchised it out to bottlers. The old brewery came down in 1958 to make way for what is now the Key Bridge Marriott. In 1962 and 1963 the Cherry Smash Corp. was still advertising from Randolph Street in Arlington as "Arlington's oldest industry." A Cherry Smash bottle from those franchise years carries word-for-word the same ingredient panel as this cap, down to the 1/20 of 1% sodium benzoate, marked "Franchised by Cherry Smash Co., Inc., Arlington, Va." That's the family this cap belongs to. Fowler died in 1960, and the foundation his widow Pearl set up with the rent from the Marriott land has been giving grants ever since.

✨ Unused NOS, a great piece for collectors of Virginia bottlers, soda fountain history, and American beverage advertising.