Free Fizz by Tristan Donovan Page A

landscape of Maine, where there is a Moxie Falls, Moxie Mountain, and Moxie Cove.
    Despite being sold on the back of a tale as fictional as the amateur plays Thompson took to writing in his twilight years, Moxie Nerve Food achieved modest success. But it still wasn’t the patent medicine hit Thompson had hoped to create. So in 1884 he carbonated his potion and relaunched it as a soda that he sold in twenty-six-ounce bottles and as a fountain syrup. To help promote his drink, Thompson hired Frank Archer, a former soda fountain clerk from Lincoln, Maine. Archer quickly proved himself as a man with a knack for attention-grabbing gimmicks. His first stunt was the Moxie Bottle Wagon, a giant recreation of the drink’s bottle in which a salesman would sit and sell soda through a hatch. Launched in the summer of 1886, Archer ordered the enormous bottle to be hauled around New England by horse-drawn cart, knowing that wherever it went it was bound to getpeople talking about Moxie. Soon Archer had a fleet of Moxie Bottle Wagons roaming the northeastern states.
    In 1907 Archer went one better with a thirty-five-foot replica Moxie bottle that toured expositions around New England before becoming a fixture at the Pine Island Amusement Park in Manchester, New Hampshire. In 1919 the company, feeling the bottle had run its course, sold off the giant bottle to a local man called Louis Messier. Messier turned the oversized promotional item into a tower-like extension for his two-bedroom cottage, creating an instant landmark and prompting jokes in newspapers about old ladies living in shoes. It remained part of the house until 1999 when it was finally dismantled. Coupled with more traditional advertising, Archer’s zany promotions turned Thompson’s reinvented nostrum into the leading soda of the Yankee North with sales of just under 2.3 million bottles in 1899. By then, however, an upstart from the south called Coca-Cola was nipping at its heels.
    John Pemberton, the creator of Coca-Cola, was born in July 1831 in Knoxville, Georgia, and like the creator of Moxie, he found himself drawn to the world of alternative medicine. In 1850 he became a student at the South Botanico Medical College, one of the schools that taught Samuel Thomson’s medical system and had so angered the firebrand herbalist in his final years. On completing his studies, Pemberton—in true Thomsonian tradition—became a “steam doctor” and set to work trying to sweat the ailments out of patients. In 1853, while still working as a steam doctor, he married Cliff, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a plantation owner. She gave birth to their only child, Charles, a year later. Pemberton eventually tired of sweating patients and in 1855 he and his family moved to Columbus, Georgia, where he opened a drugstore selling medicines, cigars, perfumes, dyes, and surgical instruments. The business thrived. But in spring 1861 as Pemberton wrote to his mother-in-law telling of his success, dark clouds were forming on the horizon.
    A few days after writing to Cliff’s mother, the seven Confederate states announced their secession from the United States in response to Abraham Lincoln’s election victory and the new president’s opposition to slavery. A month later civil war broke out. Life continued as normal for thePembertons for a while, but in May 1862 as the fighting intensified and the Union made gains in Tennessee and Virginia, Pemberton closed his store and enlisted in the Confederate cavalry. Pemberton became a lieutenant colonel in the Third Georgia Cavalry but soon quit because he didn’t like taking orders. So instead of going to war he formed a militia cavalry that would fight to protect Columbus should the Yankees make it that far.
    That moment finally came on Easter Sunday, April 16, 1865, in what would prove to be the final battle of the Civil War. The Confederate strategy was to prevent the Union troops from crossing the