Vintage 1970s Coca‑Cola Swirl Logo Bottle Cap 🍾 Campbellsville, Kentucky

Where Was This Coke Bottled? 🍾 Vintage 1970s Coca-Cola Swirl Logo Bottle Cap, Campbellsville, Kentucky

Size: 1 1/4"

These Coke caps came out of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Campbellsville, Kentucky, New Old Stock, unused and never crimped onto a bottle. Silver cap, a big red 1 across the top, and the old Coca-Cola script, just the way Coke looked on a Kentucky shelf in the 1970s.

🍾 What's on it

A big red 1 over the Coca-Cola script, "Trade-mark ®" underneath, and the whole recipe in small print right on the face of the cap: "Carbonated water, sugar, caramel color, phosphoric acid, natural flavorings, caffeine." Inside is a plain plastic liner, no cork. Like every uncrimped crown, it measures 1 1/4 inches across.

📅 How old is it?

Read the ingredients. That one word, sugar, is the tell. On January 28, 1980 Coca-Cola told its bottlers they could replace up to half the sugar with high fructose corn syrup, and by 1984 American Coke had switched over completely. A Coke cap that says plain "sugar" was printed before all that, and the plastic liner and printed ingredients put it right in the 1970s.

🏭 Coke in Campbellsville

Coca-Cola has been bottled in Campbellsville for a long, long time. It started in 1905, in the back cellar of a building on East Main Street, the same building where the town's News-Journal was printed upstairs from 1910. By the 1920s the bottling works had moved down the block into an Italianate building it shared with Louie the Greek's bar. That building is a radio station now, WVLC, "The Big Dawg." I love that a Coke plant started out in somebody's cellar.

In more recent years the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Campbellsville became part of Clark Beverage Group, the family bottling business Carsie C. Clark started as a little soda water works in Martin, Tennessee in 1903. In 1998 the Campbellsville plant was running under the Western Kentucky Coca-Cola name.

🗺️ Campbellsville and Taylor County

The town goes back to Andrew Campbell, a Virginian from Augusta County who was running a grist mill and saw mill on Buckhorn Creek by 1809. The Kentucky Legislature made it a town on January 3, 1817, named for Andrew and Adam Campbell, and when Taylor County was formed in 1848 Campbellsville became the county seat. The county was named for General Zachary Taylor, the hero of Buena Vista, who was elected President that same year.

The Civil War came right down Main Street. John Hunt Morgan made his headquarters at Redman's Tavern on New Year's Eve 1862, and on July 4, 1863 his cavalry ran into the 25th Michigan at Tebbs Bend on the Green River. The Michigan men held the bend. A house near the battlefield served as a Confederate hospital afterward, and the story told in Taylor County is that "the blood ran from the front yard into the turnpike road." That house is a museum now, right next to the Green River Lake information center.

🏡 Display

Great in a cap collection, a shadow box of Coke go-withs, or with anything Kentucky. Put it next to an older cork-lined Coke cap and you can see how the caps changed.