A few weeks ago, my friend Ellie sent me a photograph. At first glance, it looked like the kind of old picture you might find tucked inside a family Bible or sitting in a box at an antique shop. An old house. A yard covered in fallen leaves. Two young men sitting out front, dressed in the fashion of the day, looking a little stiff and not too sure what to make of the camera.
Just an ordinary photograph from another time.
Except it wasn’t.
Ellie told me what I was looking at, and my jaw about hit the floor. That house, she believes, is the birthplace of Caleb Bradham, the North Carolina man who gave the world Pepsi-Cola. And those two young men sitting among the leaves? They’re members of the Sloan family, neighbors of the Bradhams.
Now, you can take my word for it or not, but before you dismiss Ellie’s discovery, let me tell you a little about the woman who sent it to me.
Ellie is the kind of person you want beside you when you’re digging into local history. Family photographs from the 1800s hang on her walls. Family Bibles have their place on her side tables. Ride around Chinquapin with her, and she’ll point out where the old train station stood, where a long-gone store once did business, and the places most folks have forgotten ever existed. If somebody handed me a Duplin County history question and offered me one phone call, I’d call Ellie.
I wouldn’t even hesitate.
Ellie doesn’t guess. Ellie knows.
And that’s what makes this photograph so interesting.
Look up Caleb Bradham, the pharmacist who invented Pepsi-Cola, and you’ll find the same information repeated in just about every account of his life. He was born on May 27, 1867, in Chinquapin, North Carolina, to George Washington Bradham and Julia McCann Bradham. He was born at home.
But where, exactly, was that home?
That’s the question that seems to have gone unanswered. His birthplace is identified as Chinquapin, but the actual location has remained a mystery.
Caleb spent his boyhood in that little Duplin County farming community during Reconstruction. His father was a merchant and manufacturer, and the family was comfortable and well educated for the time. Caleb was a bright young man with plans of his own. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before going on to medical school at the University of Maryland.
He intended to become a doctor.
Life, however, has a funny way of taking the plans we make and doing something entirely different with them. Around 1890, his father’s business failed, and Caleb had to leave medical school and return home.
He eventually found his way to New Bern, where he became a pharmacist and operated a drugstore with one of those soda fountains that were all the rage in the late 1800s. In 1893, he began experimenting with a drink his customers called “Brad’s Drink.”
That same year, his father, George Washington Bradham, died.
Julia moved to New Bern to be near her son, and the old family property in Chinquapin was sold by the heirs. And this is where the story gets interesting.
The probate papers describe the property as the home of George W. Bradham, adjoining the lands of William H. Sloan.
The Sloans.
The same family Ellie identified with the two young men sitting in the leaves in that photograph.
There’s a family connection on my end, too. Brandon is a Burton descendant, and through the Burtons, he’s kin to those very same Sloan boys.
So when I look at Ellie’s photograph, I’m not just looking at a possible missing piece of Pepsi-Cola history. I’m looking at a place connected to families whose descendants are still walking around today.
That’s the thing about eastern North Carolina. You start digging around in the old records, follow a few family lines, and before long, you discover that somebody in the story is kin to somebody you know.
Now, take another look at the date associated with that photograph.
1898.
You know what else happened in 1898? Caleb Bradham gave his drink a new name: Pepsi-Cola.
Down in New Bern, Caleb was putting a name on a drink that would eventually become known around the world. Meanwhile, back in Chinquapin, somebody was photographing the old Bradham place, with two Sloan boys sitting out front among the autumn leaves.
To those boys, it was probably just another day. The house was part of the familiar landscape, the people around them were their neighbors, and there was no reason to imagine that a boy who had grown up in their little corner of Duplin County was about to leave his mark on the world.
They couldn’t have known what that photograph would mean more than a century later.
That’s what gets me about local history. We tend to think of history as something grand, something that announces itself with a brass band and makes sure everybody knows they’re witnessing an important moment. But most of the time, history doesn’t work that way.
Sometimes history is a house down a dirt road. It’s a family Bible with a name written on the inside cover. It’s a faded photograph taken on an ordinary afternoon, when nobody in the yard has the slightest idea that somebody, someday, will be trying to figure out exactly where they stood.
I can’t help but wonder how many other pieces of North Carolina history are sitting in somebody’s attic right now, tucked away in a box or hanging on a wall, waiting for the right person to recognize what they’re looking at.
Somebody has to save the photograph. Somebody has to study the old family records, remember where the train station stood and which family lived on that stretch of land, and keep asking questions long after everybody else has quit asking them.
That’s Ellie.
The history books say Caleb Bradham was born in Chinquapin, but nobody seems to know exactly where his birthplace stood.
Well, I’d say the history books just haven’t met Ellie.
