Vintage Sun‑Rise Orange Soda Bottle Cap 🍊 Coca‑Cola Bottling, Moultrie GA (1970s)

How Did a Virginia Soda End Up at a Georgia Coke Plant? 🍊 Sun-Rise Orange Soda Bottle Cap, Bottled by Moultrie Coca-Cola Bottling Co., Moultrie, Georgia

Size: 1 1/4"

I love a cap that tells you exactly where it was filled. Bright orange, SUN-RISE® over a silver rising sun, ORANGE SODA with a little ingredient panel underneath - and turn it on its edge and the skirt reads BOTTLED BY MOULTRIE COCA-COLA BOTTLING CO., MOULTRIE GA 31768. A Virginia soda, owned out of Minnesota, filled at the Coke plant in south Georgia. Never crimped, never used, plastic-lined. Yours will look just like this one.

☀️ Born in the Virginia Coalfields

Sun-Rise goes back to W. A. Scott of North Tazewell, Virginia. He was a partner in the wholesale grocery that Lynchburg's Duguid Brothers opened there in the 1890s, bought his partners out, and around 1910 started bottling as the Tazewell Manufacturing Company - his Was-Cott Ginger Ale went out to the rest of the country by train, because he'd built right alongside the Norfolk and Western line. A fire took the grocery and the bottling works on January 18, 1920, and Scott had a new brick plant running by April 1921. The business became the Was-Cott Corporation and then the Sun Rise Bottling Company, which first used the SUN RISE name on September 1, 1931 and kept bottling in North Tazewell until about 1960. James G. Buston was the proprietor in 1931, and the plant turned out house brands of its own - Tazewell Orange, Rhythm Punch, and a cola called Lucky Giant. In March 1947 the company was registered as a partnership of Buston, Earl Stanley Wallace and John Wharton Gillespie, and by October 1948 Buston had sold his share to the other two. When the plant closed it went to the Deskins Supermarket chain as a warehouse. The big white building is still standing there, windows bricked up - in its day it was one of the largest soda bottling plants in Virginia.

🥤 How It Got to a Coke Plant

The SUN RISE name went to Sun-Rise, Inc. of Marshall, Minnesota, which filed it with the Patent Office on April 27, 1956 - registration 639,773, issued in 1957 and renewed in 1977 - and took the brand national. From there it was the local Coca-Cola bottlers who filled it, on into the 1970s, and that's how a Coke plant in Moultrie came to run Sun-Rise orange down its line. The flavors ran to root beer and fruit drinks like black cherry and lemon sour; the company changed hands a number of times, and it was in the 1950s that Coke's bottlers took over the bottling and distribution. (Sun-Rise, Inc. filed a SUNNY-SKY soft drink mark the very same day.)

Moultrie wasn't the only Coke plant running it, either. A Sun-Rise bottle from the 1960s or '70s that turned up in an antique store in Burlington, North Carolina came out of the Coca-Cola plant there. Virginia, Minnesota and Georgia, all on one little cap.

📮 Dating It

The ZIP code on the skirt does the work. ZIP codes started on July 1, 1963, and the two-letter GA came along that October, so this cap was printed in 1963 or later - and the plastic liner, where older Sun-Rise caps had cork, fits right in.

🌾 Moultrie

Moultrie is the county seat of Colquitt County, named for General William Moultrie of Revolutionary War fame and incorporated in 1859. It's south Georgia farm country - Colquitt County is known for cotton, peanuts, watermelons, sugar cane and corn, with tobacco added in 1925 - and the county's first farm agent helped work out the Colquitt County Plan, a five-year crop-diversification plan the Farm Security Administration used as a model during the Depression. Since 1978 Moultrie's Spence Field has hosted the Sunbelt Agricultural Exposition, one of the biggest farm shows in the country. Its Coca-Cola bottler goes back far enough that the town's name is on old straight-sided Coke bottles, from before the contour bottle took over. And Moultrie's own Riverside Manufacturing Company, started in 1911, made the uniforms for Coca-Cola bottlers' route men - their sample sheets and folders from 1959 and 1963 still turn up. Moultrie had other soda men too: John Morrison Carlton Sr. and Robert M. Carlton ran a Dr Pepper bottling plant in town from 1935 to 1950.