Vintage NOS 1970s Virginia Dare Korker Bottle Cap 🥤 Brooklyn NY & New Bedford MA

What Was a Virginia Dare Korker? 🥤 Vintage NOS 1970s Bottle Cap, Brooklyn NY

Size: 1 1/4"

Korker was Virginia Dare's lemon soda, and this is one of its caps, never used and still flat at the edges. I love that a soda cap had to carry its own ingredient list, and there's a good reason it did, which I'll get to.

🔍 What's On It

A bright yellow cap with a dark green checkered band around the edge and VIRGINIA DARE KORKER in dark green, then CONTAINS CARBONATED WATER, SUGAR, CITRIC ACID, AND FLAVOR. Around the skirt, in green and yellow stripes, it says UNDER FRANCHISE V.D. EXT. CO. and ZapatA®. Inside is a molded plastic liner.

That ZapatA isn't a bottler, it's the company that made the cap. Zapata Industries of Frackville, Pennsylvania registered the ZAPATA name for bottle caps in February 1970, and their slogan was "From Z to A, the best of everything in crowns." Because the cap prints the ® after the name, it was made after that 1970 registration. Zapata made crowns in this country until 2003, when the Muskogee, Oklahoma plant closed and production moved to Mexico.

🍋 Why the Cap Tells You What's Inside

V.D. EXT. CO. is the Virginia Dare Extract Company of Brooklyn, New York. It didn't bottle anything itself. It sold its syrups to franchise bottlers all over the country, and they bottled Virginia Dare sodas "under authority." The bottlers used one plain Virginia Dare bottle for every flavor, and the bottle sent you to the cap to find out what you were drinking. A New Bedford, Massachusetts bottler's Virginia Dare bottle actually says it on the back: "TRUE OR ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR (SEE CROWN)." So the cap was the label.

Korker was Virginia Dare's 7-Up-style lemon soda, and it was around a long time. Back in 1938 a little bottler in Corinth, Mississippi called Noel's Cola was buying Korker from Virginia Dare, and the owner's son said it was one of his two favorite drinks. They even had an 11-year-old Noel's Cola Queen ride a delivery truck in the parade the day they launched.

🍇 Virginia Dare

The name goes back to Garrett & Company, the winemakers. Their line traces to a North Carolina vineyard started in 1835, and they put the name Virginia Dare on their wine made from the native scuppernong grape. Before Prohibition, Virginia Dare was the best-selling wine in the country. Garrett moved to Brooklyn around 1920 and spent 45 years in Building 10 of Bush Terminal in Sunset Park, and in 1923 the flavoring side was incorporated on its own as the Virginia Dare Extract Company, under a chemist from Massachusetts named Bernard H. Smith. His grandson Howard Smith Sr. became president in 1961 and ran it until 2009, so a Smith was in charge when this cap was printed, and the company is still making flavors in Brooklyn today.

The real Virginia Dare was born on Roanoke Island on August 18, 1587, the first English child born in the Americas, granddaughter of Governor John White, and she vanished with the rest of the Lost Colony. The legend that grew up around her says she was turned into a white doe, and in Sallie Southall Cotten's 1901 poem the place where she died sprouted a new vine whose grapes were sweet and red as blood, the scuppernong. The story goes that Garrett & Company paid for that poem and gave the book away with bottles of Virginia Dare wine. And Roanoke Island's old Mother Vine, said to be the oldest grapevine in the United States, supplied scuppernong grapes to Paul Garrett.

🏘️ New Bedford and Brooklyn

These caps came to me as New Bedford, Massachusetts and Brooklyn, New York, and both fit. Brooklyn is Virginia Dare's home, and New Bedford had a Virginia Dare franchise bottler, the Rodman Club Bottling Co. People who grew up there in the late 1970s remember the soda shop on Nash Road, kids pulling red wagons to fill a wooden case with whatever flavors they wanted, and bringing the bottles back. The cap doesn't name its bottler, but that's the world it comes from.

📏 Details

• Vintage 1970s Virginia Dare Korker crown bottle cap, yellow and dark green
• Skirt: Under franchise V.D. Ext. Co. and the ZapatA® cap maker's mark
• Molded plastic liner, never crimped onto a bottle, New Old Stock
• About 1 1/4" across
• You'll get one cap like the ones shown

🖼️ It's a fun one for a soda cap collection, a Brooklyn or New Bedford shadow box, or anybody who remembers picking flavors out of a wooden case.