Vintage NOS Mid‑1960s YUP Soda Bottle Cap 🥤 Squamscot Beverages, Newfields NH

Remember YUP Soda? 🥤 Vintage NOS Mid-1960s Bottle Cap, Squamscot Beverages, Newfields NH

Size: 1 1/4"

🥤 New Old Stock YUP soda bottle cap from Squamscot Beverages, bottled by the Conner family at Conner Bottling Works in Newfields, New Hampshire. Mid-1960s, unused and never crimped, so it measures 1 1/4" across like every uncrimped crown.

YUP is Squamscot's lemon soda, and the cap has real personality: big chunky red letters with little cut-out slashes, like something off a tiki bar sign, and the ingredients printed right underneath: Carbonated Water, Sugar, Citric Acid, Sodium Citrate, Natural and Artificial Flavors. Inside, the whole crown is lined in plastic with D·10 pressed into it. Plastic linings like that took over from cork in the early 1960s. As one soda blogger summed up the flavor: "Lemon, Yup, just lemon."

🍋 Squamscot, since 1863

William H. Conner started bottling in Newfields in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, selling a spruce "pop beer" he called Connermade in returnable glass bottles with porcelain and wire stoppers. The Conners branched out into sodas in the 1890s. William ran the works until he died in 1911, when it put out just 4,115 cases a year. His son Alfred Conner Sr. took over from 1911 to 1948, and by 1930 the label had changed to Squamscot Beverages, with 14 flavors and nearly 26,000 cases a year. The story goes that during Prohibition some harder drinks got made out back, with a friendly sheriff looking the other way.

In 1938 Alfred Sr. bought the plant's first modern bottling machine for $2,400. It was built in Baltimore, everybody calls it Dixie, and Dixie is still capping bottles just about every day. Alfred Conner Jr. ran the works from 1948 to 1979, the years this cap comes from, and after him his son Tom, with Tom's son Dan, the fifth generation.

New Hampshire once had around 60 bottlers, and the Conners are the last family-owned independent one left. Dan Conner put it best: "Never shut down, never stopped." Today 156 solar panels run the whole plant, and Squamscot sodas are carried in more than 600 stores. In 2026 Tom and Eileen Conner put the bottling works up for sale, with no one in the family set to carry it on, so what comes next for Squamscot is still being written.

🏞️ Newfields and the Squamscott River

Squamscot takes its name from the Squamscott River, which runs past Newfields into Great Bay. The Squamscott people called it Msquamskek, usually translated "at the salmon place." Edward Hilton and his family settled Newfields in 1638 along an old Squamscott trail. It was part of Exeter, then a parish of Newmarket, and became the town of South Newmarket in 1849. In 1880 Dr. John M. Brodhead offered the town his library and $10,000 on condition that it take the name Newfields, and it was incorporated under that name in 1895. Sitting at the river mouth made it a busy stop on the water route between Portsmouth, Dover, Durham, Exeter and the other Great Bay towns.

Details
🧢 New Old Stock (unused) YUP lemon soda bottle cap, never crimped
🏭 Squamscot Beverages, Conner Bottling Works, Newfields, New Hampshire
📏 1 1/4" across
⚙️ Plastic-lined, D·10 pressed inside