Vintage 1980s Nehi Orange Bottle Cap 🍊 from West Jefferson NC

Remember Nehi Orange? 🍊 Vintage 1980s Bottle Cap From West Jefferson NC

Size: 1 1/4"

🍊 Nehi Orange! If you grew up in the South, that name alone probably tastes like summer. This one's from a Blue Ridge mountain bottler, and the brand on it has a history full of Hollywood stars, a pair of stockinged legs and a leg lamp.

🔍 What's on it

A New Old Stock twist-off crown, never on a bottle, in bright orange. At the top, a white N in a circle inside an orange-and-white diamond, then ORANGE between two thin rules, NEHI in big faceted white-and-black block letters with a ®, and SINCE 1924 on a black bar. Around the skirt: "Bottled by Dr Pepper Bottling Co. West Jefferson, NC 28694," "TWIST OFF" with a curved arrow, and a small 16. Inside, a dark gray liner with a two-digit mark pressed in. Like every uncrimped crown it measures 1 1/4" across. The "Since 1924" is Nehi's birth year, not the cap's.

🦵 "Knee high"

Nehi came out in 1924 from Claud A. Hatcher's Chero-Cola company in Columbus, Georgia, the same outfit that later gave us RC Cola. Say it out loud and you get the joke: "knee high," a nod to the tall bottles it came in. The old advertising logo was a woman's legs in stockings, and that's the picture Jean Shepherd had in mind for the famous Leg Lamp in A Christmas Story. The drink was such a hit that in 1928 the whole company became the Nehi Corporation, and in 1955, riding RC's success, it renamed itself the Royal Crown Company.

Nehi had star power, too. After the war Bing Crosby, Joan Crawford and Bob Hope all endorsed it, and Robert Ripley of "Believe It or Not!" plugged it on his radio show. And every M*A*S*H fan remembers Radar O'Reilly ordering his Grape Nehi. Today Nehi is part of Keurig Dr Pepper, as it has been since 2008, and it still has a loyal following among people who love the old regional flavors.

🏔️ The West Jefferson bottler

H.R. Vannoy started the Dr Pepper Bottling Company in West Jefferson, up in Ashe County in the Blue Ridge, in 1937. Carl Colvard and Vannoy ran it through the 1940s, and the Vannoy family still owns it. These caps came out of the old plant, the two-story brick building downtown at 108–110 North Third Avenue that still wears a faded "Dr. Pepper-Grapette Bottling Co." sign and is part of the West Jefferson Historic District on the National Register. The company moved out to a newer plant on NC Highway 163, where it still bottles Nehi Orange, Nehi Grape and Nehi Peach along with dozens of other flavors, in glass longnecks with real cane sugar.

🚂 A Railroad Town in the Blue Ridge

West Jefferson grew up around the tracks. The Virginia-Carolina Railway, nicknamed the Virginia Creeper for the way its trains crawled up the mountain grades, reached the spot in 1914, and the town was incorporated the next year. It's also where the Ashe County Cheese plant has been making cheese since 1930, the oldest cheese plant in North Carolina. And that faded sign on the old bottling building names a second brand, Grapette, the grape soda Benjamin Fooks started in Camden, Arkansas, in 1939. A little mountain bottler ran several brands down the same line, Dr Pepper, Grapette and Nehi among them, which is how an orange Nehi cap ended up with a Dr Pepper bottler's name around its edge.

📌 A great little piece of Nehi and North Carolina soda history for a cap collection, a shadow box, a gift for a M*A*S*H or Christmas Story fan, or a bottle-cap craft.