Vintage Grapefruit Drink 🍊 Bottle Cap Seven-Up Bottling Co Hagerstown MD Lithographed Crown Mid-Century Soda

The Hagerstown Grapefruit Soda That Printed Its Whole Ingredient List Right on the Cap 🍊

Size: 1 1/4"

There is something I love about holding a piece of metal no bigger than your thumb and reading, in plain lithographed letters, exactly what went into the bottle it was made to seal. No fine print tucked on a back label. Just GRAPEFRUIT DRINK across a dark green field, and underneath it, on bright yellow: carbonated water, sugar, grapefruit juice and oil, pulp, citric acid, and 1/10 of 1% benzoate of soda. I've been collecting Americana for a long time, and pieces like this still stop me in my tracks. Not because they're flashy. Because so much history is packed into something this small.

🥤 What It Is

This is an unused crown-style soda cap for Grapefruit Drink, filled by the Seven-Up Bottling Co. Inc. of Hagerstown, Maryland. Turn it on its edge and the skirt spells it out all the way around: SEVEN-UP BOTTLING CO. INC. HAGERSTOWN, MD. 21740. It is New Old Stock. The fluted skirt was never squeezed down over a bottle neck, so it still flares out the way it left the press. It came to me as part of a lot of regional soda ephemera, and it is a standard crown, 1 1/4" across.

The face is lithographed straight onto the metal, two colors split down the middle: a dark green upper half carrying the name in yellow capitals, and a yellow lower half with the ingredients in dark green.

🔎 What the Cap Tells You

Two small things on this cap do a lot of talking. The first is the ZIP code. The Post Office introduced ZIP Codes on July 1, 1963, so a cap printing 21740 was made that summer or later, in the years when a town the size of Hagerstown still had its own bottling works filling local flavors.

The second is that preservative line. Benzoate of soda had its day in court long before this cap: in 1909 a federal Referee Board of chemists, headed by Ira Remsen, reported that it was not harmful in small quantities. The amount printed here, one-tenth of one percent, is the same 0.1 percent the Food and Drug Administration's rule for sodium benzoate gives as the top level in food. And there it is, printed on the cap for anybody who cared to read it.

7️⃣ A Seven-Up Bottler Filling Grapefruit

Why would a Seven-Up bottler put its name on a grapefruit soda? Because that is how the franchise bottlers worked. The plants carrying the Seven-Up name filled 7 Up, and they filled other drinks too, under their own name or under brands they bottled locally. In Washington, D.C., the Seven-Up bottler stamped its name on Brownie Orange Soda crowns and bottled Tru-Ade; in Richlands, Virginia, the Seven-Up plant filled Mission Orange and Grapette alongside the lemon-lime. A Grapefruit Drink from the Hagerstown plant fits that same pattern.

The name on the skirt goes back to St. Louis. Charles Leiper Grigg's Howdy Company applied for the SEVEN UP trademark on October 4, 1928, and the drink was first sold under the mouthful of a name "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda." By 1967 it was calling itself the Uncola.

👑 The Little Crown on the Skirt

Look along the edge and you'll find a tiny crown with a registered mark beside it. That is the emblem of Crown Cork & Seal, the company that made the cap itself, and it is a Maryland story too. William Painter, born in Triadelphia, Maryland in 1838, was granted his patents for the crown cap on February 2, 1892, and founded Crown Cork & Seal in Baltimore the same year. His son Orrin drew the company's crown logo. Painter's works stood at Guilford and Oliver streets, and by the 1930s Crown Cork & Seal was supplying half the bottle caps in the world.

Painter also handed out one of the most famous pieces of business advice in American history. He told a traveling salesman named King C. Gillette to think of something like the crown cork, which, once used, is thrown away. Gillette went off and invented the safety razor with disposable blades.

🚂 Hagerstown, Maryland

Hagerstown was founded in 1762 by Jonathan Hager and became the seat of Washington County, the first county in the country named for George Washington. It's known as the Hub City, and for more than fifty years the railroads were the county's biggest employers. Later the town was the home of the C-119 Flying Boxcar, a name its baseball team carries today. A soda plant in a busy railroad town like that, filling grapefruit, orange and lemon-lime for the neighborhood, is exactly the kind of local business these little caps remember.

🎁 Displaying It

A crown cap this size sits nicely in a shadow box with other regional soda caps, in a type-tray display, or framed beside an old Hagerstown postcard. Soda collectors, Seven-Up collectors and anybody with Maryland roots will get a kick out of it.