Coca-Cola Bottling Company Plant

When Snyder moved to Charlotte, the city of 17,000 people had some eighteen saloons and two breweries, complicating the sale of non-alcoholic beverages. But the temperance movement that swept the South and led to Prohibition (1920-1933) forced the closure of breweries and saloons across the nation. Without access to “hard” liquor, local mills and factory workers had to settle for “soft” drinks. Snyder’s first bottling plant was located on South Church Street. The company’s original bottling and distribution systems were primitive by today’s standards: capping and bottling equipment was foot-powered; one worker could fill and cap only four bottles per minute, filling only ten cases per hour; and each horse-drawn wagon used for local deliveries could only carry ten cases. But Charlotte’s railroad network eased out-of-town sales and helped Snyder’s company grow. As sales increased, the company needed bigger and more advanced manufacturing facilities, prompting the bottler to move three times to different uptown locations between 1907 and 1920. 

In 1930, Snyder made his most substantial commitment to modernization, investing $100,000 (a value of nearly $1.9 million nearly a century later) to build his customized plant on West Morehead Street. Snyder hired Marion R. Marsh (1893-1977), one of Charlotte’s most influential and successful architects throughout most of the twentieth century, to design his new bottling facility. Although he never earned a college degree, Marsh became a licensed architect and engineer through apprenticeships and correspondence courses. He went on to design a range of commercial, industrial, residential, public, and religious buildings, including Charlotte’s Carolina Cadillac Company building, Eastover Elementary School, the Fritz Seifart House, and the Builders Building.  

Construction on the new plant began in 1929 just as the Great Depression started. To reduce construction costs, Snyder hired local unemployed people to build the facility, rather than a construction company. Except for a single wooden stair railing, the entire building was constructed of masonry and steel, making it one of the first fireproof Coca-Cola buildings in the world. The building was constructed with large street level windows so that passers-by might watch the famous beverage being bottled.