Vintage 1970s Nesbitt's Strawberry Soda Bottle Cap 🥤 Hagerstown, MD

Remember Nesbitt's Strawberry Soda? 🍓 Nesbitt's Strawberry Soda Cap from the Seven-Up Bottler in Hagerstown, MD

Size: 1 1/4"

Vintage 1970s Nesbitt's Strawberry Soda bottle cap from Hagerstown, Maryland! The top is cream white with Nesbitt's in white script inside a red oval, and STRAWBERRY SODA in red block letters underneath. The whole recipe runs around the rim in tiny red capitals: carbonated water, sugar, citric acid, sodium benzoate preservative, propylene glycol, natural gum, artificial flavor and color, and pectin. The skirt tells you who filled the bottle: SEVEN-UP BOTTLING CO. INC. HAGERSTOWN, MD, with a little crown and a registered mark printed along the side. The cap was never crimped, so it never went on a bottle, and like every uncrimped crown it measures 1 1/4 inches across.

🍊 Nesbitt's, From a Los Angeles Soda Fountain to Everywhere

Hugh S. Nesbitt started the Nesbitt Fruit Products Company in Los Angeles, California, in 1924, and the Nesbitt's brand came out in 1927, first as a soda fountain product. In the late 1930s the company started bottling its orange and other flavors, which put it head to head with Orange Crush, and by the late 1940s and 1950s Nesbitt's was the best-selling orange soda in the country. It called itself the "Largest selling bottled orange drink in the world," and one of its 1946 ads featured an unknown model named Marilyn Monroe. Nesbitt's made grape, strawberry and peach sodas too, and this cap is one of the strawberries.

Then Fanta passed it in the late 1960s and Nesbitt's started to fade. The company was sold to The Clorox Company in 1972, and in April 1975 the bottling side went to Moxie Industries of Atlanta, later Monarch Beverage. Borden owned the name for a while in the late 1980s, and in 1999 Big Red, Limited of Waco, Texas, bought the Nesbitt's USA trademark and started licensing it to small independent bottlers. You can still find Nesbitt's orange, strawberry and peach from a retro soda maker today, so this flavor made it after all.

7️⃣ The Seven-Up Bottler

With a name like Seven-Up Bottling Co. on the skirt, you know what else they were filling in Hagerstown. Charles Leiper Grigg started The Howdy Corporation in St. Louis in 1920, came up with a lemon-lime formula in 1928, and had it on the market a year before the Wall Street crash of 1929. For a while it was sold as 7up Lithiated Lemon Soda, and it really did claim to contain lithium citrate, the mood-stabilizing drug. In 1936 the federal government made the company drop a pile of health claims, and in 1937 it became plain 7 Up.

Nobody really knows where the name came from, and the stories are half the fun. Britvic, which sells 7 Up in Britain, says it was the seven main ingredients, or the seven-ounce bottle back when Coca-Cola and most other sodas came in six ounces. Other folks say it was the lithium, which has an atomic mass of about 7. And there is an old tale that the drink started out as "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda," though investigators have found little or no evidence that any drink by that name ever existed. The bib label was just a paper label hung around the neck of the bottle like a bib.

👑 Why It Is Called a Crown

This little cap is a crown cork, and it has a great story. William Painter, a foreman at a Baltimore machine shop, spent 1888 to 1891 working on a cheap metal cap with crimped flutes that would lock under the lip of a bottle, with a thin cork disk inside so the drink never touched the metal. He got three patents for it on February 2, 1892. The family called it the crown cap, Painter's son Orrin drew the crown logo for the new Crown Cork & Seal Company of Baltimore, and by 1920 the company was supplying half the world's bottle caps. Painter even wrote in his patent application that his caps were cheap enough to throw away after a single use.

One of Painter's salesmen was a young man named King C. Gillette. Painter told him that since he was always inventing something, he should think of something like the crown cork, something people use once and throw away so they keep coming back for more. Gillette went on to invent the disposable safety razor.

🏘️ Hagerstown, the Hub City

Hagerstown is the county seat of Washington County, Maryland, out in the Maryland Panhandle, and it goes by the nickname the Hub City. It goes back to 1739, when Jonathan Hager, a German immigrant from Pennsylvania and a volunteer captain of scouts, bought 200 acres in the Great Appalachian Valley between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies and called it Hager's Fancy. In 1762 he founded a town there and named it Elizabethtown after his wife, Elizabeth Kershner, but everybody called it Hager's-Town, and in 1813 the town council gave in and made it official. Hager is remembered as the father of Washington County.

The Civil War came right through town. Longstreet's men occupied it on the way to Antietam in 1862, and Lee's army passed through going to and from Gettysburg in 1863. On July 6, 1864, 1,500 Confederate cavalry under John McCausland rode in and demanded a ransom of $20,000 and a big load of clothing. Local lore says the order was supposed to read $200,000 and somebody dropped a zero. Either way, Hagerstown came through it. Three weeks later McCausland demanded $500,000 in U.S. currency, or $100,000 in gold, from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and when the town could not pay he burned it.

🥤 For the Collection

A great little piece for a soda cap collection, a Nesbitt's or 7 Up collector, or anybody from Hagerstown and Washington County. It looks great in a shadow box, and it makes a fun gift for the strawberry soda lover in your life.