Vintage Big B Grape Soda Bottle Cap 🍇 | Coca‑Cola Bottling Thomasville NC

Remember Big B Grape? 🍇 Vintage Bottle Cap, Coca-Cola Bottling, Thomasville NC

Size: 1 1/4"

🍇 Vintage Big B Grape Soda Bottle Cap — Coca‑Cola Bottling, Thomasville NC

A New Old Stock grape soda crown, never crimped, so it measures 1 1/4" across like every uncrimped cap. A deep grape-purple face with a big silver B, BIG tipped on top of it and pinstripes running off both sides, then IMITATION GRAPE SODA and the fine print Artificially flavored & colored, preserved with benzoate of soda. Around the skirt the bottler signs its name: The Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Inc., Thomasville, No. Car. Inside, a plastic liner, and that's the one clue to its age: crowns with molded plastic liners came in around 1955, and cork was largely gone by about 1965, so this cap is 1955 or later.

That skirt is the fun part. This is the local Coca-Cola bottler putting its own name on a grape soda, back when hometown Coke plants filled their own flavor lines right alongside the Coca-Cola. Plenty of Coke bottlers in those years ran a flavor brand of their own for the grape, orange and root beer side of the business. Big Chief and Royal Palm were two of the better-known ones, and which line a plant carried was often its own call, until the company's own Fanta and Sprite (both brought to the States in the early '60s) slowly took that job over. Big B is the one this Thomasville plant put its name on. The old Thomasville Coca-Cola bottling plant building still stands in town.

🪑 Thomasville, the Chair City

Thomasville is named for John Warwick Thomas, who built the community's first store there by 1852. The North Carolina Railroad reached town on November 9, 1855, and Thomasville was incorporated on January 8, 1857. Furniture made it famous: Thomasville Furniture Industries started in 1904 as a chair company, and the town has called itself the Chair City ever since. It even has the Big Chair to prove it, a 30-foot concrete chair put up around 1950-51, still standing downtown in Davidson County. The first one, a 13 1/2-foot chair built in 1922, was torn down in 1936.

Condition

New Old Stock (NOS). Unused and never crimped onto a bottle.

Details

• Original vintage soda bottle cap
• Brand: Big B Imitation Grape Soda
• Bottler: The Coca‑Cola Bottling Co. Inc., Thomasville, North Carolina
• Era: 1955 or later (plastic liner)
• Material: Metal crown cap, plastic liner
• Condition: New Old Stock (NOS)