Nehi Cola & Gas Station nickname '' the bottle'' Auburn, Alabama
From 1924 to 1933, the lot at the corner of Alabama Highway 147 and U.S. Highway 280 held an impressive roadside attraction: The world’s largest Nehi bottle.
The 64-foot-high, bottle-shaped building was constructed as a promotion for the Nehi Cola brand, but it served the community as a grocery, gas station and housing for the store’s owners for nearly a decade.
Visitors were allowed to tour the bottle, climbing to the top of the bottle neck to see a 360-degree view of the countryside. Williams built in a gas station and store on the first floor and an apartment for the store’s managers on the second floor. It had no electricity.
John F. Williams, the owner of the Nehi Bottling Company in Opelika stopped by the farm of the family farm of W.W. Bradley in Farmville, Alabama, to ask if he could use an outer parcel of his land for a building project.
Williams went by the nickname “Chero-Cola” Williams after the name of the company that owned Nehi products at that time.
Williams wanted to use the giant bottle as a roadside advertisement. The Nehi line of fruit-flavored soft drinks was introduced the same year in orange, grape, root beer, peach, and other flavors.
It became an instant hit, and the company changed its name to Nehi Corp. in 1928. When Nehi sales softened during the Great Depression, Nehi makes reformulated their failed Chero-Cola and named it Royal Crown Cola. The company again changed its name, this time to Royal Crown Cola Co.
FDR and Minnie Pearl had stopped by after visiting Auburn
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