Vintage 1980s Nehi Peach Bottle Cap 🍑 Transports You to Jefferson NC

Remember Nehi Peach? 🍑 Nehi Peach Crown Cap from the Old Dr Pepper Plant in West Jefferson

Size: 1 1/4" ~ Unused, never crimped onto a bottle.

These are vintage Nehi Peach soda bottle caps from the Dr Pepper bottling plant up in West Jefferson, NC, and not one of them has ever been on a bottle. Each is a salmon pink crown with the Nehi diamond N up top, a little PEACH between two thin rules, big faceted NEHI letters in black and white, and SINCE 1924 reversed out of a dark bar underneath. Like every uncrimped crown, they measure 1 1/4 inches across.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• N in a diamond
• PEACH
• NEHI ®
• SINCE 1924

The inside is a plain lined crown with the fluted skirt still standing straight, just the way they came off the line.

🏔️ Where These Came From

These came out of the old Dr Pepper bottling plant in West Jefferson, right next door to Jefferson up in Ashe County in the Blue Ridge. Back in 2008 the company was calling itself one of the oldest Dr Pepper bottlers in the nation, more than 80 years in business. H.R. Vannoy, who had settled in West Jefferson by 1930, owned the plant, and he and Carl Colvard ran it through the 1940s. The old plant is the two-story brick building downtown on North Third Avenue, built about 1940, that still wears a faded "Dr. Pepper-Grapette Bottling Co." sign, and it's part of the West Jefferson Historic District. The company moved out to a newer plant and kept on bottling, and it's one of the few Dr Pepper bottlers that stayed with real sugar.

🥤 Knee-High Bottles

Nehi goes back to Claud A. Hatcher, a grocer in Columbus, Georgia, who started bottling ginger ale and root beer in 1905. His Chero-Cola company brought out Nehi in 1924, and the name was there to remind folks it came in "knee-high" tall bottles. There was orange, grape, root beer and peach, the one on these caps. The company became the Nehi Corporation in 1928, and Bing Crosby, Joan Crawford, Bob Hope and plenty of others helped sell it, while Robert Ripley plugged Nehi on his radio show, "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" In 1955 the company renamed itself Royal Crown after the big success of RC Cola.

And if you watched M*A*S*H, you already know Radar's favorite drink was Grape Nehi. In April 2008 Nehi became a brand of the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, now Keurig Dr Pepper, and you can still find it today.

🏡 Display

These look great in a shadow box, on a bottle cap map or in a jar on the kitchen shelf, and a Nehi Peach is a nice find for anybody putting together a run of Southern soda caps.