Former Coke Syrup Production Plant in Baltimore MD
Coca-Cola Baltimore Branch Factory, Baltimore Maryland

The Coca-Cola Company Baltimore Branch Factory on East Fort Avenue, a complex of two 1921 buildings with a 1935 addition. Completed in 1948, the complex housed syrup-making operations as well as the Coca-Cola Company's chemistry department. The Baltimore Branch Factory was an integral element in the production of Coca-Cola, "a sublimated essence of all that America stands for."
One phase of the continuing industrial development that characterizes Baltimore occurred in the 1920s, as the city succeeded in "capturing its share of the nation's new branch plants." The growth in branch plants was due in part to a promotional effort begun in 1913 by the Industrial Factory Site Commission; the Commission attracted outside capital to Baltimore and helped integrate the city into the national economy. These regional representatives of national corporations included the operations of Lever Brothers, Procter & Gamble, Montgomery Ward, and the Coca-Cola Company.
The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia does not produce soft drinks but the thick, sugary syrup from which soft drinks are made. As the world's largest syrup producer, the company supplies thousands of local, typically independent bottling plants and soda fountains worldwide with the syrup, which these distributors then mix with carbonated water to produce the familiar beverage. Though it is the many local bottling plants that essentially provide Coca-Cola with its public architectural face, the company itself operates the regional branch plants where it produces all of its syrup. The Baltimore Branch Factory was one of seven Coca-Cola plants in the U.S. at the time it was built in 1921 and marks a time of great growth for the company.
Coca-Cola witnessed an almost-continual rise in demand for its drinks in the early part of the century, spurred by massive advertising campaigns. Advertising was a hallmark of Coca-Cola since the syrup's creator John Pemberton began promoting the product in the late 1880s. In 1911 the company spent $1 million on advertising, up from just $100,000 in 1901, and figures continued to climb. Selling an image and a lifestyle more than just a drink, the company fought legal battles with imitators in order to protect and differentiate its image and name.
The construction of the Coca-Cola Company Baltimore Branch Factory corresponded with major changes in the evolution of the Coca-Cola Company. Nationally, the total production of bottled soft drinks of all types more than doubled between 1914 and 1919. Consumers buying soda in bottles could buy it in almost any venue, expanding sales opportunities far beyond soda fountains. Though Coca-Cola first granted all large-scale bottling rights to two Tennessee businessmen in 1899, historian Pat Watters quotes one local bottler as saying that "bottled Coca-Cola didn't really 'take off until the 1920s." By 1928 bottled Coca-Cola outsold that delivered by soda fountains for the first time, up from just 32% of sales in 1910. Combining product image with product delivery, the company trademarked the design of its bottle in 1915.
The 1920s were a time of change in Coca-Cola's corporate structure as well. On September 12th, 1919 a consortium of businessmen and banks bought the company from the heirs of long-time president Asa Griggs Candler (1851-1929). The cost of the takeover was $25 million and represented the largest transaction in the South to that point. The new company was incorporated in Delaware with Samuel Candler Dobbs as president and Charles Howard Candler chairman of the board, and for the first time Coca-Cola sold its stock to the public. Robert Woodruff (1889-1985), whose father had led the takeover, became president of the company in 1923 and continued to influence it for 62 years.
The company's experience in Baltimore mirrored its national growth. The Coca-Cola Company first established a Baltimore sales office in 1903 in rented quarters. Coca-Cola built its first syrup plant in Baltimore in 1911, supplying bottlers and soda fountains of the Mid-Atlantic region as the company's seventh U.S. production facility. The plant occupied a portion of the Candler Building in downtown Baltimore. Designed by engineer Arthur C. Tufts, whose engineering and contracting firm would later design the 1921 Syrup Factory on Fort Avenue, the eight-story reinforced concrete Candler Building stands on Market Place at Lombard Street. The hybrid industrial-office structure served as both a company plant and a speculative real estate venture for company president Asa Candler. With a Coca-Cola sign on the roof, the building was known as "the Coca-Cola Building," though the Coca-Cola Company was only one of several contemporary tenants. Similarly diverse Candler Buildings also rose elsewhere, including Atlanta (1904-1906, George Murphy and George Stewart), New York City (1914, Willauer, Shape & Bready) and Kansas City (Tufts, 1915).
Arthur Tufts' firm was based in Atlanta and was involved in a number of Coca-Cola-related projects along with the Candler Buildings. As is typical for designers of industrial buildings during this period, Tufts was an engineer and general contractor. When Asa G. Candler gave $1 million for a new Henry Hornbostel-designed campus for Emory University in Atlanta, Tufts was the general contractor for the new buildings (1919). At the time Arthur C. Tufts & Co. designed the Branch Factory on Fort Avenue in 1920, Baltimore city directories list the firm as an Atlanta general contractor with a local office at 1401 Lexington Street.
The Syrup Factory was built on East Fort Avenue, where it found both transportation connections and access to a ready supply of materials. The nearby early 20th Century Key Highway, intended for industrial hauling, provided connections to the regional highway network over which tanker trucks could transport Coca-Cola syrup to local bottlers. Connections to important regional rail lines were also immediate: the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad operated its major Locust Point Terminal to the southeast of the syrup plant, and the railroad connected all of the various shipping piers that studded the peninsula. The Baltimore Branch Factory was soon serving an area between New York and Washington, D.C., and stretching westward into Ohio, an area well-served by the B&O Railroad. The syrup plant itself had single-track rail spurs on its east and west sides, both eventually expanded into double-track spurs. Shipping connections through Baltimore also supported the Fort Avenue plant, allowing it to serve markets overseas. Coca-Cola had first entered the Mexican market in 1898 and entered Cuba a year later. Coca-Cola products manufactured in North America were bottled in 27 countries by the 1930s, and a 1936 article noted that "a tremendous export market has been developed for Coca-Cola, and the Baltimore operation benefits to a large extent by this business, since much of the syrup for foreign consumption is shipped from this port."
Most important for the siting of a syrup plant was the availability of raw materials, which consist mainly of water and granulated sugar. Baltimore had an advantage in that it had modernized its water system in the early 20th Century. Though each Coca-Cola plant purified its own water to achieve a uniform taste, cleaner incoming water required less purification. Sugar, however, was the key factor in the construction of the Coca-Cola plant. By 1919 the company had become the largest consumer of granulated cane sugar in the world, using almost 100 million pounds per year worldwide. The branch factory went up at the same time as the nearby plant of the American Sugar & Refining Company, a major North American site for the importation and refining of South American cane sugar. The American plant (1920), later known as Domino Sugars, is the most prominent factory on the north side of Locust Point and is visible from the Coca-Cola factory. Both factories share the same stretch of Baltimore & Ohio Railroad trackage.
So important was the relatively small site that the factory as it was built in 1921 had the capability of carrying additional floors at a later date. The factory also grew in the early 1930s when Coca-Cola acquired the adjacent Simmons Building (ca. 1921) at 1201 East Fort Avenue. (City directories first list the Baltimore branch of the bed- and mattress-making Simmons Company in the two-story factory beginning in 1921, and the firm continues to appear in directories and phone books until 1932.)
Granulated sugar or sucrose was the costliest ingredient in the company's syrup, and the company experienced major supply problems shortly before it built the Baltimore factory. World War I rationing practically eliminated profits for the company. Sugar was rationed in April 1917, and in 1918 Federal Food Administrator Herbert Hoover requested that Coca-Cola use half the sugar it had used the year before. The company experimented with corn syrup and other sweeteners, and what syrup it was able to produce it had to ration out to bottlers. When government rationing ended in 1919, Coca-Cola had the sugar to increase sales by more than 8 million gallons over 1918 numbers.
The most harmful result of the shortage was yet to come. In 1920, smarting from the shortages and facing high postwar prices charged by the Cuban sugar cartel, Coca-Cola adopted a policy of keeping a sixty-day supply of sugar in inventory whatever the cost. At the same time Coca-Cola bottlers, involved in a legal dispute with the company, forced the company to lose money by sticking to the fixed syrup prices of prewar contracts. The company contracted for a half-year's supply of sugar at $0.28 per pound, four times the pre-war price, just before world sugar supplies increased and prices began to drop. The Coca-Cola Company fell into financial jeopardy trying to pay for its sugar.
The Candler Building and the Fort Avenue factory are the only buildings the Coca-Cola Company built in Baltimore, though the city is home to one building of a related enterprise. Founded in 1905, the distinct Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Baltimore purchased syrup from the Coca-Cola Company for carbonation and packaging. In 1936 the bottling company built a new bottling plant on Kirk Avenue, one of thousands of such plants worldwide, all contracting with Coca-Cola for syrup. In fact, the Coca-Cola Company owned the Baltimore bottler between 1923 and 1980; nonetheless, the local bottling company remained a separate entity from the Atlanta syrup producer, and closed its Kirk Avenue plant in 1981.
The Baltimore factory became unique in 1935 when the chemists of the Research Department of Coca-Cola, the main laboratory overseeing all of the company's syrup plants nationwide, moved there from Atlanta." The laboratory was an essential element in the production process. Chemists began to control operations at all of Coca-Cola's syrup plants nationwide in 1924. Because the company strove to keep its syrup the same between plants and within each plant over time, consistency became the goal of production. Dr. William Heath, an expert on carbonation, was director of Coca-Cola's Research Department when it relocated to Baltimore and moved to Baltimore to run it.
Dr. William Pratt Heath (1875-1950) worked on the construction of the first carbon dioxide manufacturing plant in the South in 1899 as vice president of the N.P. Pratt Laboratory in Atlanta. In 1919 the laboratory joined Coca-Cola and Heath was made Coca-Cola vice president in charge of chemical control and production. Heath's work with the company is notable: he pioneered water purification for bottling plants based on World War I research into activated carbon; he developed specifications for the syrup ingredients and tests of syrup quality; and he developed a pressure gauge and the internationally-used Heath Tables for determining the volume of gas in a carbonated beverage. In Atlanta and subsequently in Baltimore, Heath's laboratory was in charge of soft-drink flavoring and chemical formulas for the Coca-Cola Company. Heath returned to Atlanta in 1942, at the age of 67.
The last structural addition to the Baltimore Branch Factory occurred in 1948, when Coca-Cola extended two bays of the Syrup Factory's front facade northward. The addition housed a pair of 25,000-gallon storage tanks for caramel coloring. The construction of the "Tank Room" addition marks the end of the period of expansion for the complex, which substantially achieved its present configuration in 1948.
With its 1935 Sugar Warehouse addition, the 1948 addition to the Syrup Factory, and the Simmons Building, Coca-Cola's Baltimore Branch Factory functioned as follows. Workers unloaded the vast amounts of sugar that were coming to the plant via boxcar along the eastern rail spur. An electric hoist and tram system stacked the sugar bags and lifted them through an enclosed bridge over the intervening cooperage to the syrup factory. At the front or north part of the factory's second floor stood a row of 5,000-gallon steel mixing tanks into which workers dumped the sugar. The tanks' electrically-powered paddles mixed the sugar with clean water drawn from filters in the northwest corner of the basement. Into the mixing tanks workers added smaller amounts of the various other ingredients required: chief among these was caramel coloring, stored after rail tanker delivery in a pair of tall 25,000-gallon tanks in the Syrup Factory's extreme northeast corner. Other ingredients arrived in barrels. The finished syrup left the bottom of the mixing tanks in the first floor of the Syrup Factory, where packaging and shipping took place. To distribute the syrup to soda fountains and bottlers, employees filled jugs and barrels with syrup. The factory used excess space to store empty barrels; the soft-drink industry in general was a highly seasonal businesses and the factory regularly had more barrels than it needed.
Changes came to the sugar supply and to the Baltimore branch factory in the postwar years. The factory shifted away from using 100-lb bags of sugar and began taking already-melted sugar in tanker trucks. In the late 1960s plant managers installed an overhead augur delivery system for granulated sugar that traveled the length of the Sugar Warehouse and then snaked across the roof of the Syrup Factory in a narrow one-story blind metal addition. The augur system drew from bulk sugar deliveries stored in a receptacle in the southwest corner of the warehouse capable of holding 18 carloads of sugar. The industry-wide conversion from granulated sugar to corn syrup, which began in the 1970s and was hastened by the early-1980s sugar-cartel price hikes, allowed the factory to reduce its inventory further. A mere two or three days' supply of corn syrup could be kept in a 17,000-gallon tank car by the plant, allowing the sugar warehouse to become a storage space for proliferating packaging materials as well as raw ingredients. The factory could not abandon sugar in its granulated form entirely, however: some bottlers held to the wordings of their long-term contracts, which tied the price they paid for syrup to the market price of granulated sugar.
Perhaps the most important factors affecting the plant in the late 20th Century were changes in packaging, spurred by shifts in soda fountain consumption. Convenient five-gallon stainless-steel canisters, introduced in the mid-1960s, grew in popularity along with the rapid expansion of McDonald's restaurants and soon supplanted the 55-gallon barrel. The Baltimore factory devoted the first floor of the Simmons Building to cleaning the canisters as they arrived by truck at the front (north) loading bays; the second floor of the Simmons Building and the parking lot to the south held excess canisters during the off-season. A pair of ground-level bridges (ca. 1967 and 1980) took the clean canisters from the Simmons Building into the filling area in the Syrup Factory. The company's fleet of tanker trucks also filled up with syrup in a two-bay garage added to the front of the Syrup Factory around 1969.
New production lines allowed for new flavors, including Fanta in 1960 and Sprite in 1961. The Coca-Cola Factory also housed a separate division that supplied the world with a syrup concentrate based on powdered and liquid components. The concentrate division occupied rooms in the east side of the basement as well as space, now gone, within the Sugar Warehouse before moving to Atlanta in the late 1970s. The introduction of artificial sweeteners such as saccharine and aspartame changed the dynamics of the sugar supply, and in 1978 the company introduced its low-calorie Tab. In 1982 the company introduced Diet Coke and in 1985 Cherry Coke and the ill-fated New Coke; by the 1990s Coca-Cola, Diet Coca-Cola, and Sprite made up about 80% of production at the factory.
In the last decades of the 20th century, the Coca-Cola Company moved production out of its aging and labor-intensive Baltimore plant. By the last decades of the century, employees numbered between 90 and 125 depending on the season. In the 1980s five-gallon "bag-in-box" packaging began to replace the five-gallon stainless-steel canisters that served the fountain industry. The factory's bag-in-box filling operation occupied the center of the second floor of the Syrup Factory, with pumps lifting the syrup there from the mixing tank outputs on the first floor. To add to the container variety, larger McDonald's restaurants began to receive shipments through an exclusive 75-gallon tank system. The Baltimore Branch Factory, as the last of Coca-Cola's U.S. syrup plants to produce syrup in 5000-gallon batches by manual transfer, became too expensive to operate. In November 1997 the company closed the plant and moved production to a new and larger facility in York, Pennsylvania, where it could streamline production and use an automated continuous-production process.
Site Description
The Coca-Cola Company Baltimore Branch Factory, constructed from 1921 to 1935, is an early 20th-century industrial complex constructed to house Coca-Cola's syrup-making operations. The complex, which spreads over a 9.4 acre site south of East Fort Avenue in an industrial area of Locust Point, is composed of a two-story brick syrup factory/sugar warehouse and an earlier two-story brick mattress factory (the Simmons Building) that Coca-Cola acquired and adapted in the 1930s. Coca-Cola extended the 1921 Syrup Factory, designed by Arthur C. Tufts, to the south in 1935 when they built the Sugar Warehouse addition, designed by Robert & Co. The facades of both the Simmons Building and the 1921 Syrup Factory are detailed with a modular pier and spandrel system; the Sugar Warehouse addition is a brick box with punched windows. The Simmons Building and the Sugar Warehouse employ steel frame construction; the 1921 Syrup Factory has a reinforced concrete structural system. The interiors of the Simmons Building and the Sugar Warehouse addition consist of open plan space; the interior of the Syrup Factory consists primarily of open plan space with partitioned offices along the perimeter of the south and west walls of the second floor. In a manner typical of industrial complexes, the Coca-Cola Company Baltimore Branch Factory has been altered over the years. Glass block occupies many of the openings that earlier housed industrial steel sash windows; in 1948 the Syrup Factory was expanded at the northeast by a new addition that repeats the pier and spandrel articulation of the 1921 building. Minor, post-1948 additions include two ground-level bridges linking the Simmons Building with the Syrup Factory. The only demolition that has occurred is the removal of a small office/weigh station at the front of the complex on East Fort Avenue. None of these changes impair the original form, construction, and interrelationship of the buildings; the complex continues to be a strong local representation of an important facet of the operations of a major national corporation.
The Coca-Cola Company Baltimore Branch Factory is an early 20th-century industrial complex composed of a factory and warehouse that housed Coca-Cola's syrup-making operations. The complex, which faces north onto East Fort Avenue, consists of two brick buildings, both two stories high. The Simmons Building was built ca. 1921 and purchased by Coca-Cola in the early 1930s; the Syrup Factory was built in 1921 and was extended with a large rear Sugar Warehouse addition in 1935 (see Site Plan). The Syrup Factory, situated southeast of the Simmons Building, connects to the Simmons Building via two ground-level bridges. Production circulation generally flowed from the rear (south) to the front at East Fort Avenue, and from the upper floor to the lower floor. Double-track rail spurs line the east and west sides of the Syrup Factory and join the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad's line to its Locust Point Terminal to the south. In addition railroad tracks define the east edge of the site, running under East Fort Avenue north to the American Sugar and Refining Company (Domino Sugars). Loading docks for trucks are located at the west side of the Syrup Factory and the north side of the Simmons Building; a loading dock for railway cars is located on the east side of the Syrup Factory, with a canopied overhead rail transfer apparatus at the west side of the Syrup Factory's warehouse addition. The site also incorporates two large paved areas that accommodated truck loading and parking: One lies to the west of the Syrup Factory, accessed by a drive skirting the west side of the Simmons Building. East Fort Avenue, the major street of Locust Point, defines the front or north edge of the site and is lined by a second paved area.
The Simmons Building is a two-story rectangular steel-frame brick building constructed ca. 1921. The building occupies the northwest corner of the Coca-Cola site, with its front facade facing north onto East Fort Avenue. The building was originally built as a mattress factory and was occupied by Coca-Cola ca. 1933. The steel-frame brick building features pier and spandrel construction with later glass block windows; east and south facade windows retain industrial steel sash. A stepped parapet tops the front facade and incorporates one-bay returns; a flat steel-truss roof with skylights tops the building. Details consist of concrete sills and pier caps, and the building rests on a concrete foundation. The seven-bay front facade of the Simmons Building contains loading bays, while the rear facade is occupied by a one-story metal-sided ell (built by 1951) for refrigerated storage. A stair tower occupies the center of the nine-bay east side facade, while a one-story metal scale enclosure (ca. 1969-1972) is attached to east side facade. The east facade's first-floor fenestration includes window openings as well as loading bays. A pair of ground-level bridges connects the southeast corner of the Simmons Building to the 1921 Syrup Factory. The northern bridge was constructed ca. 1967 and the southern bridge in 1980.
The interior of the Simmons Building exhibits an exposed structural system and consists of open-plan space. The irregular concrete floor includes a raised loading platform at the north or front end of the building, accessed by concrete ramps. Two dilapidated wood stairs access the building's upper floors, an open-riser stair at the center of the east wall and an enclosed stair at the northwest corner of the building. The second-floor flooring, which has been damaged in several locations, has been covered by composition board flooring
The Syrup Factory is a two-story rectangular brick-faced reinforced concrete building that fronts north onto a paved area south of East Fort Avenue. The building marks Coca-Cola's occupation of the site and was built by the company as a manufacturing and warehouse facility. A cooperage space connects the building to a 1935 full-width rear addition devoted to warehousing sugar.
The nine-bay front (north) facade of the Syrup Factory includes a two-bay tank room projection at the eastern end (1948) and a one-story five-bay metal-sided bulk syrup storage and loading garage (1969). Visible above the building's flat roof are other one- and two-story blind metal-sided additions (ca. 1960s). The nine-bay side facades of the Syrup Factory differ from each other: the east facade consists of varied fenestration, including a number of loading doors along a full-length railroad loading dock with canopy. The west facade consists of an overhanging second floor above a partially infilled recessed truck loading area eight bays in length. At the rear, the building steps down to a one-story brick Cooperage (1921) connecting the building to the Sugar Warehouse to the south. The large stack rises from the east end of the Cooperage.
The interior of the Syrup Factory consists of open-plan space, with offices and other rooms lining the perimeter walls of the second floor. The exposed reinforced concrete structural system consists of reinforced concrete piers with mushroom caps. A stair at the southwest corner of the building provides access to the upper floors. In addition three ca. 1935 metal spiral stairs reach the second floor, one near each of the northeast and northwest corners and a third at the center of the south wall. Freight elevators stand at the southwest corner and at the center of the east wall. The one-bay tank room (1948) protruding from the northeast corner of the Syrup Factory is a double-height space containing two large metal tanks; adjacent are a later syrup storage room and the tanker loading garage (1969), both one-story spaces. In addition several holes for tanks, now gone, pierce the second floor along the north (front) wall of the factory.
The second floor of the Syrup Factory contains partitioned spaces at its south, east and west edges. Lining the west wall of the second floor are the factory office and later laboratory; on the east wall are the employee canteen and rooms for mixing Fanta soda; occupying the center of the floor are two small partitioned rooms. Raised and tiled floors define other mixing zones: the largest is at the front or north wall, where Coca-Cola was mixed. Sugar arrived at the second floor via the "sugar tunnel" (1935), which connects to the warehouse to the south.
The only one-story portion of the complex consists of a Cooperage connecting the south (rear) wall of the two-story factory building to the north end of the Sugar Warehouse. Most of the full-width five-bay cooperage was built at the same time as the factory, with the southernmost bay dating to the construction of the Sugar Warehouse (1935). Unlike the reinforced concrete factory, the Cooperage consists of steel frame construction supporting a flat steel-truss roof pierced by four skylights. The east side of the open-plan cooperage houses the upper portion of the factory's basement boiler room. The boiler's stack is in poor condition. The floor of the southernmost bay of the Cooperage incorporates level changes necessary to join the 1921 Syrup Factory to the 1935 Sugar Warehouse. The catwalk of the Sugar Warehouse connects directly to the second floor of the Syrup Factory.
The Sugar Warehouse is a long eighteen-bay north-south addition with a rectangular footprint connected to the rear of the Syrup Factory. The one-story brick warehouse contains triple-height open-plan interior space of steel-frame construction. Punched industrial steel sash windows occupy the upper level of the building. Irregularly spaced loading bays punctuate both east and west facades, with one bay on each side covered by later metal canopies. In addition, a metal canopy extends from the west facade across the adjacent railroad spur to shelter an overhead loading apparatus. Overall detailing of the flat-roofed building is simpler than the earlier buildings of the complex and includes concrete sills and a subdued brick cornice below the parapet.
The floor of the warehouse meets the basement level of the adjoining Syrup Factory below grade. A first-floor-level mezzanine lines the east wall of the building; windows correspond to the second-floor level of the Syrup Factory. The later entrances to the building are on the west side: a truck ramp leads from grade level down to the floor of the warehouse at its northwest corner, and a garage door in the west wall provides access to an interior platform at grade.

Complex from East Fort Avenue, front facade (2000)

View to northeast showing Simmone Building, Syrup Factory, and Sugar Warehouse (left to right) (2000)

Simmons Building front (2000)

Simmons Building west side (2000)

Simmons Building rear side (2000)

Simmons Building east side (2000)

Syrup Factory front (2000)

Syrup Factory east side (2000)

Syrup Factory west side (2000)

Sugar Warehouse west side (2000)

Sugar Warehouse rear (2000)

Sugar Warehouse east side (2000)

Simmons Building first floor (2000)

Syrup Factory first floor (2000)
