Woodbury is one of the oldest towns in Meriwether County. It grew up about 10 miles southeast of Greenville in the late 1820s. For many years residents called the town "Sandtown" for the area's white sand and when the post office opened in 1845, they officially changed the name to Woodbury.
In 1887, Woodbury hit a growth spurt when the railroad laid its tracks and made its mark. Shortly thereafter, Woodbury saw tremendous growth with schools, churches, and businesses serving the many new residents.
The Brunswick Coca-Cola Bottling Company, founded in 1903, originally produced Coca-Cola along with soda and mineral water at Ludwig Bottling Works on Bay Street. In 1905, Mr. L. Ludwig merged his company with G.W. Cline who operated the Brunswick Steam Laundry on Richmond Street, where one boiler could be used for both steam cleaning clothes and washing bottles.
The company was incorporated in 1907 as the Brunswick Coca-Cola Bottling Company. During 1912, it was purchased by J.L. Andrews and O.F. Copeland and Sons, where Mr. A.B. Copeland served as manager. This began a Brunswick Coca-Cola family connection that was to last over seventy years.
O.F. Copeland was considered a pioneer in the promotion of Coca-Cola in Georgia. During the company’s early years, he and his sons and grandsons invested in plants in Lagrange, Athens, Cornelia, Woodbury, and Sylvania as well as Brunswick. In 1917, the plant moved to Newcastle Street. M.A. Copeland Sr., became manager in 1921 and later bought out J.L. Andrew’s interest to become president. In 1929, the company moved to its present location on Mansfield Street where Coca-Cola was bottled until the mid 1980’s.
The Brunswick Coca-Cola Bottling Company remained in the Copeland family until 1988 when it was purchased by Coca-Cola Bottling Company United, Inc., headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama.
Brunswick Coca-Cola and its 45+ employees are proud of our continued support of the many civic and charitable organizations serving our communities.
Pimento Festival
The picture at the top is of a group of girls at the Woodbury, GA pimento festival. (Photo courtesy of Robert Lovett.)
When it comes to pimento cheese, it’s the pepper that rooted the spread in this region. Initially imported from Spain, the pimiento (and with it, pimento cheese) was considered something of a delicacy. By 1908, however, the pepper made its way to southern California. It more than succeeded there. A headline in 1914 for the LA Times announced, “Pimientos and Chilis worth half million.” But where the pepper really took off was in the South.
Around the same time that the pimiento was flourishing on the west coast, a family in Experiment, Georgia planted the pepper’s seeds and established a canning facility on a nearby farm. With that, at least for a while, pimientos were over for California. As the LA Times warned, “The Southern California pimento industry has a new rival which she should consider seriously. If Sherman should go marching through Georgia in 1922 he would probably be surprised to find that they are forsaking the cotton fields to harvest the pimento, which is being grown in some sections of that State.”
A lot of the recipes simply tucked pimientos into something already known, like meat loaf, broiled fish and eggs. Some were pimiento-centric, like cream of pimiento soup and pimiento consommé. But the only place the peppers seem to have stuck, at least in name, were in pimiento cheese. It is what people knew and wanted, and that became easier in the South as the peppers increased in availability.
By the mid-twentieth century, Georgia grew 90% of the nation’s pimientos, and canneries opened in small towns across the western part of the state in order to process them. Pimiento parades were held. Pimiento queens were crowned in towns like Woodbury. Pepper factories and farms spread to other regions of the South. And with pimentos firmly situated in the region, pimento cheese became an affordable product that was favored not only by the upper class, who served the spread on dainty, crust-less sandwiches, but also among the area’s burgeoning working class.
Pimento cheese rolled through textile mills on dope carts—wagons that sold sandwiches and colas (dopes) to workers who were encouraged to eat on site as they found time. In the Piedmont of North Carolina, companies like Star Foods of Burlington and Ruth’s Salads of Charlotte sold the spread to mill commissaries or vending ma-chines, as well as stocking shelves as the local groceries for those who wanted to make their own lunch to take with them. Today, though most of the Piedmont’s mills have closed, the region still holds rank as one of the top consumers of pimento cheese.
Pimientos, however, have all but gone. Starting in the 1960s, Moody Dunbar, a company that’s now the largest pimiento packer in the nation, who owns a vast majority of labels including Dromedary and Sunshine, moved all of its growing and canning operations from east Tennessee to California. It’s the same, tired story of big agriculture. Out west, peppers can be produced on large farms with fewer expenses, compared to doing some on multiple small fields in the South.
It’s the pretty red dot in cheese. In the wake of the boll weevil, farms across west Georgia employed the pepper as a means to diversify their reliance on cotton. The University of Georgia’s Agriculture station tested different varieties and released publications about what was best to grow and how to do so. Canneries published pimento cookbooks equipped with a study that listed health benefits of the peppers, which are full of vitamins A and C. They also touted pimientos as a way to provide meals with an “artistic garnish.”
