Dixie Coca-Cola Bottling Company Plant


The Dixie Coca-Cola Bottling Company Plant, also known as Baptist Student Center, Georgia State University or Baptist Student Union, Georgia State University, is a historic building at 125 Edgewood Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia. Built in 1891, it was the headquarters and bottling plant of the Dixie Coca-Cola Bottling Company, and the place where the transition from Coca-Cola as a drink served at a soda fountain to a mass-marketed bottled soft drink took place. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1983, and is one of the only buildings in Atlanta dating to Coca-Cola's early history. Since 1966 the building has been the Baptist Student Union for Georgia State University.

Description and history

The former Dixie Coca-Cola building is located in downtown Atlanta, at the southeast corner of Edgewood Avenue and Courtland Street. It is a relatively small two-story structure, mostly built out of brick, with a projecting wood-frame clapboarded square turret at the corner. The building is irregularly shaped, due in part to the unusual lot on which it stands. Its Edgewood Avenue facade has three large arched windows on the first floor, and Queen Anne-style variety of shapes defining its roof line at and above the second level.
The building was built in 1891, and was from 1900-01 home to the Dixi Coca-Cola Bottling Company, established by Benjamin Franklin Thomas and Joseph Brown Whitehead in 1899 as the exclusive bottler of Coca-Cola for a large part of the United States. Of ten sites definitively established with the early history of Coca-Cola, it is the only one still standing. Since 1966, it has served as Georgia State University's Baptist Student Center. It had deteriorated in condition by the 1970s, including some loss of its historic integrity, but has since undergone at least an exterior restoration.

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