On the 16th of August, 1888, every druggist in Atlanta locked the doors of their shop and walked together through the summer heat to bury one of their own. The man in the coffin had invented something, a dark carbonated syrup that he sold from a pharmacy counter for 5 cents a glass. He died broke, still chasing the morphine that had owned him since the Civil War.
His name was John Stith Pemberton. The drink was Coca-Cola. Within 3 years of his death, an ambitious pharmacist named Asa Griggs Candler would claim full ownership of that formula. He paid, across a series of murky deals, a total of around $2,300. Candler turned those $2,300 into a corporation worth millions.
He built skyscrapers. He bankrolled a university. He became the mayor of Atlanta. Then, in 1919, his children sold the entire company to a group of investors for $25 million. Today, the Coca-Cola company is valued at roughly $340 billion. The Candler children used their money to build enormous mansions across Atlanta’s most fashionable neighborhood.
They filled those homes with pipe organs, exotic animals, and scandal. One heir drank himself to ruin. Another watched her husband die from gunshots in their own library. The patriarch himself ended his days in tabloid disgrace, married to a woman half his age. The family that replaced them, the Woodruffs, held on for 60 years and built a global empire from the ashes of the Candler sale.
This is the story of Coca-Cola’s two dynasties, what they built, what they lost, and the price of selling too early. Chapter 1, the wounded soldier’s recipe. On a warm Easter Sunday in April of 1865, Union Cavalry under General James Wilson stormed the city of Columbus, Georgia. It was among the last engagements of the Civil War, fought days after Lee had already surrendered at Appomattox.
Most of the soldiers defending the city knew the war was over. They fought anyway. Among them was a 43-year-old pharmacist serving as lieutenant colonel in the Third Georgia Cavalry Battalion. His name was John Stith Pemberton. During the assault, a Union saber caught him across the chest. The wound nearly killed him.
The morphine they gave him to manage the pain would finish the job slowly over the next 23 years. Pemberton had been a respected figure long before the war. Born in 1831 in Knoxville, Georgia, he earned his pharmacy license at 19 and built a successful practice in Columbus. His laboratory was considered among the finest in the South, stocked with $35,000 worth of specialized equipment.
He married Ann Eliza Clifford Lewis in 1853. They had one son, Charles. After the war, Pemberton moved his operations to Atlanta, a city pulling itself from the wreckage of Sherman’s march. He manufactured patent medicines and sold them across the region. But private agony drove his professional ambition.
The morphine dependency that followed his injury consumed both his health and his income. He experimented constantly, searching for something that could replace the drug that was destroying him. His first significant attempt was a concoction he called French Wine Coca. It blended red wine with extracts of the coca leaf and the cola nut.
The coca provided cocaine. The cola provided caffeine. He marketed it as a cure for nervous disorders, headaches, and fatigue. It sold well across the Southeast. But in 1886, Atlanta and Fulton County passed temperance legislation that banned the sale of alcohol. Pemberton’s profitable tonic was suddenly illegal. He had to reformulate.
Working with drugstore owner Willis Venable, he stripped out the wine and adjusted the recipe through trial and error. What emerged was a thick, sweet syrup. Mixed with carbonated water at a pharmacy counter, it produced something altogether different from medicine. Pemberton’s bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, suggested the name.
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He thought two capital C’s would look striking in advertising. Robinson also penned the flowing script logo by hand. It remains virtually unchanged to this day. On May 8th, 1886, the first glass of Coca-Cola was poured at Jacob’s Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta. It sold for 5 cents. About nine servings moved on an average day. Pemberton ran his first newspaper advertisement 3 weeks later, calling it delicious, refreshing, and invigorating.
He sensed the formula had potential. >> >> He told associates that it might someday become a national drink, but his body was failing. Stomach cancer joined the morphine addiction in draining whatever remained of his strength. Desperate for money, he began selling off pieces of his ownership to various business partners around Atlanta.
His son, Charlie, wanted cash, not shares. >> >> Through a tangle of deals that historians still struggle to fully untangle, a fellow Atlanta pharmacist named Asa Griggs Candler acquired the rights to the name, the formula, and the business in stages between 1888 and 1891. The total cost across all transactions >> >> came to roughly $2,300.
Pemberton did not live to see Candler’s first full year of ownership. He died at his home in Atlanta on August 16th, 1888, 57 years old. The cancer had spread through his stomach. The morphine had long since spread through everything else. His body was returned to Columbus and buried at Linwood Cemetery. He left behind a widow with nothing and a son who had inherited his father’s worst affliction.
Charlie Pemberton tried to sell his own version of the formula. It went nowhere. He died roughly 6 years after his father consumed by the same opiates that had started it all. The drink they left behind had barely begun. Chapter 2, the pharmacist who bought an empire. The story goes that Asa Griggs Candler arrived in Atlanta in 1873 with a dollar and 75 cents in his pocket.
He was 21 years old. A druggist named George Jefferson Howard hired him on his first day. And Candler reportedly stayed until midnight without pay just to prove he was worth keeping. Within 5 years he had married the boss’s daughter, Lucy Elizabeth Howard and bought into a competing pharmacy. Within a decade, he owned it outright.
Candler was not a glamorous figure. He was a Methodist who did not drink, did not approve of idleness, and measured a man’s character by how early he arrived at the office. He built a profitable business manufacturing patent medicines, but he understood that the real money was in finding one product that could sell everywhere.
He first tasted Coca-Cola sometime in the late 1880s. Candler suffered from chronic headaches. Someone offered him a glass. He liked it. More importantly, he watched other people like it. While Pemberton saw medicine, Candler saw a refreshment. The acquisition of the formula cost him roughly $2,300 across several transactions.
What came next cost him everything he had in a different sense. His first strategic decision was critical. He stopped advertising Coca-Cola as a cure for ailments and began promoting it simply as a delicious drink. In 1892, he incorporated the Coca-Cola Company with an initial capitalization of $100,000. Then came the coupons.
Thousands of handwritten tickets offering a free glass at any participating drugstore. He sent barrels of syrup to pharmacies that had never heard of the product wagering that once people tasted it, they would come back and pay. By 1895, Coca-Cola was sold in every state and territory in the country. Syrup sales had grown from roughly 9,000 gallons in 1890 to more than 370,000 gallons by 1900.
He also sold the bottling rights. In 1899, two lawyers from Chattanooga convinced Candler to let them bottle and distribute Coca-Cola across most of the United States. He charged them $1. He did not believe bottles would amount to much. Within 20 years, more than a thousand bottling plants were operating nationwide. It was one of the most consequential misjudgments in American business.
As wealth accumulated, Candler remade Atlanta. He completed the Candler Building on Peachtree Street in 1906, a 17-story marble tower that became the city’s tallest structure and first steel skyscraper. He developed the Druid Hills neighborhood, personally financing roads and water lines. In 1914, he pledged $1 million and 75 acres to relocate Emory College from the small town of Oxford to Atlanta, where it became Emory University.
His lifetime gifts to the institution totaled roughly $8 million. In 1916, he ran for mayor and won, handing control of Coca-Cola to his five children. The following May, a warehouse fire in the Fourth Ward spread across 50 city blocks and destroyed more than 1,500 homes. Candler ordered houses dynamited to starve the flames. The city rebuilt.
But by 1919, his wife Lucy was dead of breast cancer after 41 years of marriage. Within months, the children he had entrusted with his empire did the one thing he never expected. They sold it. Chapter 3, The Bottle That Conquered America. By 1915, Coca-Cola had a problem that had nothing to do with taste.
It had imitators, dozens of them. Companies with names like Coconola, Coca-Cola, and Mocola were filling identical straight-sided bottles with similar-looking syrup and hoping nobody would notice. Many customers did not. Paper labels peeled off in the ice buckets where shopkeepers stored their drinks.
And once the label was gone, every bottle looked the same. >> >> The Coca-Cola Bottling Association wanted a bottle so distinctive that a person could recognize it by touch in the dark, even broken on the ground. The shape alone should give it away. They sent the challenge to roughly 10 glass manufacturers across the country. In Terre Haute, Indiana, a team at the Root Glass Company went looking for inspiration.
The designer, a machinist named Earl Dean, walked to the local library with a colleague and searched for images of the coca leaf and cola nut. They found neither. What they did find in the Encyclopedia Britannica was an illustration of a cocoa pod. Coca-Cola had nothing to do with cocoa, but the pod had an elongated shape with prominent ribs that caught Dean’s eye.
He sketched a bottle based on its curves. The original prototype was fatter than what eventually went into production. The bulging center would not fit the existing bottling machinery, so the design was slimmed and adjusted over the summer of 1915. The patent was filed under the name of Root Glass Plant supervisor, Alexander Samuelson.
Dean chose lifetime employment at the company over a $500 prize. Coca-Cola’s executives picked the Root design as the clear winner. Bottlers across the country began using the new contour bottle in 1917. Within a few years, it had become the most recognizable commercial container in the world. In 1950, it became the first consumer product ever featured on the cover of Time magazine.
The bottle did more than sell drinks. It made Coca-Cola impossible to counterfeit. And it turned a liquid commodity into something closer to a branded object. When Asa Candler’s children decided to cash out 2 years later, the contour bottle was part of what made the company worth buying at a price that would have seemed absurd a generation earlier.
Chapter 4, the $25 million mistake. The children did not agonize over the decision. Their father had handed them control of the Coca-Cola company in 1916 when he became mayor. Their mother was dying. The business, while enormously profitable, faced an uncertain regulatory climate and growing legal battles over caffeine and labeling.
When a syndicate led by Ernest Woodruff, president of the Trust Company of Georgia, offered $25 million, the Candler heirs took it. The deal closed on September 5th, 1919. It was the largest financial transaction in the history of the American South. The new owners immediately restructured the company and took it public.
500,000 shares were offered at $40 each. Investors across Atlanta lined up to buy. A single share purchased that year would eventually be worth millions. Asa Candler, still mourning his wife, accepted the sale with resignation. He later remarked that when he gave the children the business, it became theirs to do with as they wished.
He would not have sold, he said, but from a business standpoint, they had driven a hard bargain. Whether he believed that or merely needed to, the record does not say. The children believed they had been shrewd. $25 million in 1919 was an almost incomprehensible fortune. They could not have known that the company they had just released would grow into one of the most valuable corporations on Earth.
They could not have foreseen Robert Woodruff, Ernest’s 33-year-old son, who would take the presidency in 1923 and spend the next six decades turning Coca-Cola into a global empire. What the Candler children could see was the money in front of them. And they spent it exactly the way you would expect the heirs of a southern dynasty to spend a sudden fortune.
They built mansions. Chapter 5, The Mansion Arms Race. Along Briarcliff Road and the surrounding streets of Druid Hills, the Candler children planted their fortunes into the ground. One by one, between roughly 1916 and 1922, each of the five heirs built an estate designed to outshine the others. Their father had given them a neighborhood.
They turned it into a monument. The eldest, Charles Howard, built Callanwolde. Designed by Henry Hornbostel, the same architect who laid out the Emory University campus, the Gothic Tudor mansion stretched across 27,000 square feet on a 12-acre estate. Its centerpiece was a custom Aeolian pipe organ built into the walls with chambers hidden behind carved tracery so music could fill every room from a single console.
Walnut paneling, stained glass, and bronze balustrades ran through the house. Charles served as chairman of Emory’s Board of Trustees for nearly 30 years. His home looked the part. The second son, Asa Jr., known to everyone as Buddy, went bigger. His estate, Briarcliff, sat on 42 acres just north of his brother’s property.
The Georgian Revival mansion featured its own Aeolian organ, larger than Charles’s. It also included two swimming pools, a golf course, a working farm, and a private zoo. Where Charles built for respectability, Buddy built for spectacle. Their sister Lucy, the only daughter, married a banker named Henry Heinz.
They built Rainbow Terrace on Ponce de Leon Avenue, an elegant home with formal gardens and a library that would later become the most infamous room in the family’s history. Walter, the third son, built Lullwater House on a wooded property with a creek and waterfall. He was a businessman and horse sportsman, quieter than his brothers, >> >> and his estate reflected a preference for land over architecture.
The house and grounds were eventually purchased by Emory University. Lullwater has served as the university president’s residence ever since. The youngest, William, built Rest Haven on Springdale Road. Designed by the noted architect Neel Reid, it was the most restrained of the five estates. William had no interest in building a monument.
His home fit the neighborhood rather than towering above it. He became president of the Atlanta Biltmore Hotel and died in 1936 at just 46 years old, the first of the siblings to go. Their father watched all of this from his own mansion at 1500 Ponce de Leon Avenue, a house he had built the same year he became mayor.
Asa Sr. had built a fortune by spending as little as possible. His children had learned a different lesson, >> >> but the money he had created was now scattered across Druid Hills in the form of pipe organs, swimming pools, and private zoos. The family had turned Coca-Cola money into a small kingdom.
Chapter 6, Buddy’s Zoo and the fall of a fortune. Of all the Candler children, the one Atlanta could not stop talking about was the second son. Asa Griggs Candler Jr. known since boyhood as Buddy, had been trouble from the start. At Emory College, he skipped classes, smuggled a goat into the bell tower, and earned the yearbook title of class pugilist.
His father sent him to Los Angeles to open Coca-Cola’s West Coast operations. He spent most of his time in pool halls. But Buddy had energy and money forgave a great deal. He built the Briarcliff Hotel in Atlanta’s Virginia Highland neighborhood. He supervised construction of the airfield that would eventually become Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
He raised airplanes. He collected magic tricks from China and India, and later hired a Filipino magician named Jose Cruz to live on the estate and perform at parties. He hosted soirees in a gold leaf ballroom on the top floor of his mansion, where professional magicians mingled with Atlanta’s society crowd.
Then, in the early 1930s, he bought a zoo. The animals arrived by truck and were paraded through the residential streets of Druid Hills to the Briarcliff grounds. His brother Walter reportedly looked on and said it was the biggest fool thing Buddy had done yet. The collection included a Bengal tiger, four lions, a black leopard, a gorilla, baboons, and a group of elephants he named Coca, Cola, Pauses, Refreshes, Refreshing, and Delicious.
He opened the grounds to the public and charged 25 cents admission. The neighbors tolerated the noise and smell for a while. Then a baboon escaped, attacked a woman, and devoured $60 in cash from her purse. She sued. She won $10,000. Buddy, facing mounting financial trouble, was forced to close the menagerie. He donated the entire collection to the Grant Park Zoo, which eventually became Zoo Atlanta.
The drinking, which had followed him since college, never stopped. He sold the Briarcliff estate in 1948 and spent his final years in the penthouse of his own hotel. He died on January 11th, 1953. The mansion he left behind was converted into an alcohol treatment facility, the first in Georgia. The irony required no explanation.
Chapter 7 The patriarch’s disgrace. Asa Candler had known only one woman his entire adult life. Lucy Elizabeth kept the household steady while he built an empire. When she died in early 1919, something in him broke that no amount of money could fix. He was 67. Within months, his children sold the company he had spent three decades building.
He did not fight them. He let them go. Then, unmoored for the first time in his adult life, he began making decisions that would have been unthinkable a year earlier. First came Onie Zima de Bushelle, a socialite from New Orleans who was decades younger. They became engaged. The family intervened and pressured Asa to break it off.
He did. She sued him for breach of promise. The newspapers ran the story on front pages across the South. The suit failed, but the damage to his reputation had already been done. In June of 1923, he married May Little Reagan, a widowed stenographer from his office building. She was 35. He was 71. She had twin daughters.
Within months, May was arrested for drinking at a disreputable establishment. Asa filed for divorce in the summer of 1924. Then, for reasons no one has adequately explained, he withdrew the suit that December. She moved back in. He began giving away what remained of his fortune. His gifts to Emory University, already immense, continued until he had set aside barely enough to live on.
In 1926, a stroke left him unable to care for himself. He spent his final years in and out of Wesley Memorial Hospital. Asa Griggs Candler died on March 12th, 1929. He was 77. He had arrived in Atlanta with a dollar and 75 cents. He had turned a pharmacy drink into a national corporation, built skyscrapers, funded a university, and run the city as its mayor.
He ended his days in a hospital bed. His fortune was gone. His family was scattered across Druid Hills in mansions he would never visit again. He was buried at Westview Cemetery, not far from the mausoleum his son Buddy had spent 20 years building. Chapter 8: Murder at Rainbow Terrace. Someone had been breaking into the house for months.
Small amounts of cash kept disappearing from Lucy’s purse and from drawers left unlocked overnight. Henry Heinz, her husband, was not a man accustomed to being stolen from. He was vice president of Citizens and Southern Bank, a founder of the Atlanta Boys Club, the driving force behind Scottish Rite Hospital, and serving his second term as president of the Atlanta Athletic Club.
He had offered the local patrol officers a $100 reward if they caught the thief. Two officers, Marion Blackwell and Bill Miller, had begun patrolling the grounds each night. Heinz kept watch himself some evenings, sitting up late in the rooms facing the garden. On the evening of September 28th, 1943, a railroad worker named Blaylock was at home recovering from a recent surgery.
Friends arrived and invited his wife on a country drive. She took the children and left. Alone and restless, Blaylock drove across town to Druid Hills. He had broken into Rainbow Terrace twice before. The second time, just weeks earlier, he had taken $80 from Lucy’s purse in the dressing room. He knew the layout of the house.
That same evening, Heinz was inside. He was 63 years old. When the intruder entered, Heinz did not call the police. He went after the man himself. What happened next remains disputed. Lucy called the hospital and the police around 10:00 that night. The first report said Heinz and a companion had been wrestling with a burglar.
When officers Blackwell and Miller arrived, the same two men who had been patrolling the property for weeks, they encountered a figure crouching in the bushes outside the house and opened fire. It was not the intruder. It was the couple’s son-in-law, Dr. Bryant King Vann, whose property connected to Rainbow Terrace by a dirt path.
Vann survived. He insisted he had come to investigate the commotion. He always disputed whether he had fired first. Henry Heinz did not survive. He was found shot in the library, the same room where the family had entertained guests for two decades. Blaylock later confessed. He wrote his account on a yellow sheet of paper, describing how he had entered the house, how Heinz had confronted him, and how the encounter turned fatal.
The Candler family posted a $2,500 reward. Lucy hired Raymond Ector, a retired city detective known for blending into saloons and back alley bars, to track down additional leads. Ector told the press his investigation was progressing satisfactorily and that he had located new witnesses. He never came close to finding anything the official account had missed.
The case was closed, but Atlanta never fully accepted it. Rumors persisted for years that a relative, not a stranger, had pulled the trigger. The son-in-law in the bushes, the officers who already knew the property, the conflicting accounts of who fired when, none of it settled cleanly. Lucy described the intruder as either a light-skinned black man or a white man.
Police found dark smudges near the window where the intruder had entered. Some speculated that someone had wanted to appear to be something they were not. Lucy could not bear to remain in the house. She eventually married Enrico Leide, a cellist and conductor who had founded a forerunner of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
>> >> She lived until 1962. Rainbow Terrace passed through other hands and was eventually divided into condominiums. The library where Henry Heinz died is still there. >> >> Chapter 9 The man who made Coca-Cola global. Robert Woodruff was nothing like the Candlers. He had no interest in mansions, pipe organs, or private zoos.
He failed out of Georgia Tech. He barely lasted a term at Emory, where faculty later noted he excelled mainly at cutting classes and spending money. He started his career at 19 shoveling sand at a foundry in Atlanta for wages his father considered beneath the family name. What Robert Woodruff had was an instinct for selling things, and once he found his way into sales at the White Motor Company in Cleveland, he rose so fast that he was a vice president before he turned 30.
When his father, Ernest, led the syndicate that purchased Coca-Cola from the Candler children, Robert had bought shares of his own. By 1923, those shares were in trouble. Stock that had been offered at $40 had fallen to 18. The company owed more than it could pay. Three of Ernest’s associates traveled to New York to persuade Robert to take over.
He agreed, despite a salary of $36,000 a year, roughly 50,000 less than he had been earning at White Motor. He later explained the decision plainly. He figured if he could bring the stock back to what he had paid for it, he would sell, get even, and go back to selling cars and trucks. >> >> He never went back.
Instead, he rebuilt the company around a single obsession, quality. He found that some fountain operators were cheating on the syrup, that bottling plants were unclean, that bottles were coming off the line half-washed. He abolished the traditional sales department and replaced it with a service department, whose job was not to push syrup, but to help bottlers and distributors improve their operations.
He set up training schools for fountain salesmen. He launched a massive advertising campaign built around the slogan that would define an era, the pause that refreshes. His deeper ambition went beyond America. He wanted Coca-Cola to be, in his words, within arms reach of desire everywhere in the world. Not just in drugstores, not just in bottles, anywhere a person might be thirsty, a Coca-Cola should be waiting.
Under his direction, bottling operations opened across Latin America, Europe, and Asia. By the late 1930s, the company was operating in 44 countries. The drink began to feel less like a product and more like an extension of American identity. Woodruff understood this. He did not just sell syrup.
He sold an image of satisfaction that crossed borders and languages. He had married Nell Hodgson in 1912. They had no children. The company became his only legacy, and he guarded it accordingly. He officially stepped down as president in 1955, but never released his grip. Through the board and the finance committee, he guided Coca-Cola’s direction for more than half a century.
He handpicked every successor. He remained until his death in 1985 at the age of 95, the most powerful figure in the company’s history. Where the Candlers had built a product, Woodruff built a brand. And the moment that made both possible arrived not in a boardroom, but on a battlefield. Chapter 10: 5 billion bottles.
In 1941, the United States entered a war and sugar was rationed. For most American companies that relied on it, this was a crisis. For Robert Woodruff, it became the greatest business opportunity of the 20th century. >> >> He issued a directive that year. Every man in uniform would get a bottle of Coca-Cola for 5 cents, wherever he was stationed, whatever the cost to the company.
>> >> It was patriotic. It was also brilliant. Because the military classified Coca-Cola as essential to troop morale, the company was exempted from sugar rationing entirely. In June of 1943, General Dwight Eisenhower sent an urgent cable from Allied Headquarters in North Africa. He requested 10 portable bottling plants, 3 million filled bottles of Coca-Cola, and enough equipment to produce the same quantity twice a month.
Within 6 months, a company engineer had flown to Algiers and opened the first plant. By the war’s end, 64 bottling operations had been erected across Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific, set up as close to combat zones as possible. The company sent 148 employees overseas to build and maintain the plants. They were issued army uniforms, given the rank of technical observer, >> >> and treated as commissioned officers.
The soldiers had their own name for them, the Coca-Cola Colonels. More than 5 billion bottles were consumed by American service personnel during the war. The drink arrived by supply ship, by cargo plane, and sometimes by Jeep, dispensed from small mobile units designed to keep Coca-Cola cold without reliable electricity.
For soldiers in foxholes and field hospitals, it was not a beverage. It was a piece of home. But the lasting effect was not sentimental. It was strategic. In every country where those 64 plants operated, local populations tasted Coca-Cola for the first time. When the war ended, the infrastructure remained.
Plants that had been built to serve soldiers were converted to serve civilians. Between the mid-1940s and 1960, the number of countries with bottling operations nearly doubled. What had begun as a wartime gesture became the foundation for a global business that no competitor could replicate. Even the Soviet military developed a taste for it.
Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who led the Red Army into Berlin, was introduced to Coca-Cola by Eisenhower during post-war negotiations. Zhukov liked it so much that he requested a special colorless version so it would resemble vodka and draw less attention from Moscow. The company quietly obliged. By the time Robert Woodruff stepped back from daily management in the mid-1950s, Coca-Cola was no longer an American product sold abroad.
It was a global presence. The 5-cent promise he had made to the military had returned more than any advertising campaign could have purchased. The Candler children had sold an empire for $25 million. The war alone had built one worth many times that. Chapter 11, What remained. The Coca-Cola Company is today worth more than $340 billion.
Its products are sold in more than 200 countries. Nearly 2 billion servings are consumed every day. The 5 cent fountain drink that John Pemberton mixed in an Atlanta pharmacy has become one of the most recognized brands in human history. The family that created it owns none of it. The mansions outlasted the Candlers.
Not all of them and not gracefully, but the houses that Coca-Cola money built along Briarcliff Road and Ponce de Leon Avenue are still standing. Each one repurposed for something the family never imagined. Callanwold, the Gothic Tudor estate where Charles Howard had installed an Aeolian organ in the walls, was donated to Emory University after his death in 1957.
Emory sold it. It passed through a church, then to DeKalb County, and in 1972 it became the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center. Today it hosts jazz concerts, poetry readings, and painting classes in rooms that were built to impress Atlanta society. The organ still works. The audience has changed. Briarcliff fared worse.
After Buddy went bankrupt and sold the estate in 1948, the government planned a veterans hospital that never materialized. In 1953, the year Buddy died, the mansion became the Georgian Clinic, Georgia’s first alcohol treatment center. The man who could not stop drinking had built the house where others would learn to.
Later it housed the Georgia Mental Health Institute. When that closed in the late 1990s, Emory University absorbed the campus but left the mansion itself vacant. It remains empty today. Its windows boarded behind a thick granite wall. Its gardens swallowed by undergrowth. Its gold leaf ballroom and organ chambers silent.
Preservationists have warned for years that it may be too late to save. Walter’s Lullwater House found the most dignified second life. He sold it to Emory in 1958 and since 1963 it has served as the university president’s residence. >> >> His creek, his waterfall, and his wooded grounds are now enjoyed by someone who did not build them.
Rainbow Terrace, where Henry Heinz was shot in the library, became a boarding house after Lucy left. It was eventually divided into condominiums. The library where a man died is now someone’s living room. The other homes scattered in different directions. Asa senior’s house at 1500 Ponce de Leon Avenue became a Greek Catholic Church.
William, the youngest and quietest of the five, had died first in 1936 at 46. His house on Springdale Road passed out of the family’s hands without ceremony. None of the Candler heirs held onto their Coca-Cola stock. They had sold the company in 1919 for $25 million and spent the next several decades spending it, investing it badly, and watching it disappear.
Had any one of them kept a single share from the original offering, it would have split 11 times over the following century, becoming more than 9,000 shares. One share purchased at $40 in 1919 would today be worth more than $700,000 in stock value alone before dividends. >> >> The family that created Coca-Cola chose houses over shares, spectacle over patience.
The houses crumbled. The stock only climbed. Robert Woodruff, who had no children and wanted no mansions, understood something the Candlers never did. He gave most of his fortune away, but he did it while holding onto the stock that generated it. His single gift to Emory University in 1979, $105 million in the form of 3 million Coca-Cola shares, was at that time the largest donation ever made to a single educational institution.
He funded the art center that now bears his name, the park in downtown Atlanta that bears his name, and a health sciences center at Emory that bears his name. He preferred to give anonymously. He had a foundation called Trebor, which was simply his first name spelled backward. Much of Atlanta did not learn who had been paying for their city until after he was gone.
Woodruff died in 1985 and was buried at Westview Cemetery, the same grounds where Asa Candler had been laid to rest more than half a century earlier. The founder of the company and the man who made it immortal ended up in the same soil a few hundred yards apart. But in Druid Hills, only the Candler name still clings to the walls.
You can walk through Callanwold on a Tuesday evening and hear a piano student practicing in a room where Charles Howard once entertained governors. You can drive past Briarcliff and see nothing but boarded windows behind stone. Pemberton died broke. Candler died diminished. The children died scattered. Woodruff died at 95, still holding shares he had bought more than 60 years earlier.
The drink outlived them all. It outlived the mansions, the zoos, the pipe organs, and the fortunes. Somewhere right now, someone is opening a bottle of Coca-Cola who has never heard any of their names. That was always the point. The product was never about the people who made it. It was about the people who drank it.
