Historically Speaking: The bubbly world of the soda fountain
When, in 1866, Frank Hervey installed a soda fountain in his restaurant on Front Street, he was bucking the trend.
Most soda fountains were found in drugstores. The water cure craze that swept the United States in the 1850s involved not only plunging into hot and cold baths but drinking naturally sourced mineral water to improve health. Some of this water tasted very unpleasant, particularly if it was from a sulfur spring, but if the level of carbon dioxide in the water was high, there was a pleasant fizzy quality. Surely this was beneficial to the body.
Early soda fountains, including Frank Hervey’s, added fruit-based syrups. Drug stores quickly added medicinal ingredients. Ginger ale, first developed in Ireland, arrived in the United States, and was adapted to settle the stomach (a use we still find today). Individual drugstores and apothecaries made their own recipes, but we’ll give credit to the first commercialized ginger ale syrup to James Vernor, a pharmacist from Detroit. His medicinal ginger ale was marketed in 1866. In our part of the country, Augustine Thompson, a homeopathic doctor from Lowell, Massachusetts, began marketing Moxie as a “nerve food” in 1876. He added carbonation a few years later, perhaps to mask the taste, and sold the brand throughout the country. Dr. Pepper was created by pharmacist Charles Alderton in Waco, Texas in 1885. Coca Cola by Dr. John Pemberton was developed to ease morphine addiction in Atlanta, Georgia in 1886 and Pepsi Cola was introduced in 1893 to aid digestion. A few of these concoctions had some nasty ingredients in early formulations, and yet they were gobbled up as “healthy” in much the same way that we gave in to the frozen yogurt craze in the 1990s.
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The “Standard Manual of Soda and Other Beverages,” published in 1897, advised, “every pharmacist should have at the apparatus within easy reach all the various medicinal agents commonly asked for at the fountain. An effervescent salt for headache is probably oftenest demanded; sodium bicarbonate is also frequently called for.” It also advises that “a person who has been imbibing quite freely and needs a sobering drink should have a glass of plain soda or mineral water well charged with gas, the drink being reinforced with a little aromatic spirit of ammonia, a bromide, tincture of valerian, or elixir of ammonium valerianate.” Whether this would sober him up or punish him for drinking is debatable.
By 1900, all the drugstores in Exeter had a soda fountain as a feature. It was seen as a money-maker and rather than being purely utilitarian, had features designed to be attractive to customers. An 1887 description of Cram & Anderson’s drugstore reads like a Zillow ad: “Cram & Anderson have added to their already finely appointed drug store by far the costliest and most elegant fountain for soda and similar beverages in southern New Hampshire. It is a wall fountain, of celebrated Matthews make, made at its owners’ special direction. The sides are of black Belgian marble, relieved by delicate tracery in gilt, the front is of Alps green marble, and the sloping covers of a mottled brown Tennessee. Surmounting the fountain proper is a large, heavy plate glass mirror, with decorations cut at the sides and with ‘Cram & Anderson, Exeter, N.H.’ cut at the top.”
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The various drug stores competed, adding descriptions of their fountains to every advertisement. The Exeter Drug Co., in 1895, described itself as “the Handsomest Fountain in Town.” Weeks & Seward fired back with, “A few points worth remembering: We are making and serving the best soda in town. A clean practical fountain, a cool, attractive store, intelligent clean attendants, cool thin glasses to drink from, a chair or two to sit on. All these needs a second trip to our fountain.”
Respectability and health were the most important features of drug store soda fountains. These were temperance days, and none wished to be associated with the degrading popularity of saloons.
Soda drinks had more features than simply syrup-based concoctions. Crushed fruit, ice cream and eggs were often featured. The “Standard Manual of Soda and Other Beverages” gave advice for these drinks. For an ice cream soda, “put about 1 ½ to 2 fluid ounces of syrup into the glass, turn in the fine stream of carbonated water, moving the glass about quickly so that the stream may play upon every portion of the syrup in the glass; then turn in the course stream until the glass is more than half full then turn in the fine stream for a moment so as to mix the contents of the glass again; now drop in the ice cream, and fill up the glass with the fine stream, turning in enough of the latter so that the layer of foam rises nicely above the glass.” A perfect ice cream soda should result in “a layered mixture of thick syrup on the bottom, carbonated water above this, the whole covered with a meager amount of foam, and the ice cream floating about just beneath the surface of the foam.” The soda jerk, so named for the method he used to pull at the soda fountain handles, was an artist similar to today’s high-end barista.
Drug store soda fountains continued to be popular into the 20th century, particularly during prohibition. But change was on the horizon. As early as 1895, Wetherell’s drug store was advertising a product called “Phoss,” which could be bought at the fountain or in returnable bottles to take on a picnic or for home consumption. Branded syrups, like those listed above, required exact mixing to replicate the flavor. Soda fountains adapted to soda dispensers, which mixed the soda water and syrup at the same time. As bottled drinks began to overtake fountains, it became more convenient to pick them up at the local grocery store. This is why you won’t find soda fountains at the drug store today.
However, you will still find soda fountains. They exist in restaurants, bars, movie theaters and, somewhat oddly, gas station convenience stores. Their devotees are fiercely loyal, as one explained, “the taste is more pronounced. Often canned soda has a metallic taste, also freshness.” To that you can probably add that fountain drinks are slightly greener if you bring your own cup.
Barbara Rimkunas is the curator of the Exeter Historical Society. Join the Exeter Historical Society online at www.exeterhistory.org.
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Historically Speaking: The bubbly world of the soda fountain
