Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 11, 1992                   TAG: 9203110274
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DAVID REED
DATELINE: RURAL RETREAT                                LENGTH: Medium

WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO TELL A PEPPER STORY, TOO?

Stroll into Dr. Charles Pepper's old Rural Retreat Drug Store. Drop four bits for the namesake soda and you'll get five different versions from five people before you can drink it down.

"They carried this story down through the years, but everything gets pretty well mixed up," Sigred Neff said Tuesday.

Fact merges with fiction, even in the company's official history, to make a syrupy but spirited concoction of romance, dejection and betrayal.

After reading about a museum opening last year to honor the invention of Dr Pepper in Waco, Texas, folks with connections to Rural Retreat tried to set Stroll into Dr. Charles Pepper's old Rural Retreat Drug Store. Drop four bits for the namesake soda and you'll get five different versions of how the soft drink got its start from five people before you can drink it down. things straight.

This much is well-documented andagreed to by all sides:

There was a real Dr. Pepper. He was born in 1830, the son of one of the oldest families in the New River Valley. "He's buried right up the hill there in the graveyard, you can see it for yourself," Jim Lloyd said.

Pepper graduated from the University of Virginia Medical School in 1855. After patching up Confederates during the Civil War, he quit the surgical profession, bought a drugstore in Rural Retreat and became a pharmacist.

A few years later, Pepper hired an assistant pharmacist named Wade Morrison, and that is where things get sticky.

"I've heard three tales about this," said Lloyd, the only barber in this Southwestern Virginia town of 970 residents.

"There was this young man [Morrison] who liked Dr. Pepper's daughter," Lloyd said. "There used to be a soda fountain here, and he invented it and tried to get in good with her father by naming it after him. It didn't cut any slack with Dr. Pepper. He [Morrison] went away, brokenhearted, to Waco."

Nobody could say whether the doctor ever ordered up a glass of the special fruit syrup and seltzer.

Other tales from the drugstore were that the daughter, not the doctor, rejected the assistant pharmacist, and that Dr. Pepper's youngest son, Louis, invented the formula.

A more popular adaptation came from Dr. Doug Humphrey, the mayor and dentist who has an office on the other side of the drugstore: Dr. Pepper invented the drink. Morrison stole the formula in revenge and sold it in Texas.

Neff, the town's unofficial historian, searched her house and came up with an old ledger in which Dr. Pepper makes vague references to "swamp root," quinine, spices, raisins and soda.

Most soft drinks - including Coca Cola in 1886 - originated in drugstores. But Jim Ball, Dr Pepper Co.'s official historian, said "there is no proof it ever existed" in Rural Retreat.

According to company brochures and the Waco museum, Dr. Pepper "had an attractive young daughter and it wasn't long before a romance developed between Morrison and the girl. The doctor discouraged the affair and a dejected Morrison left Virginia."

Morrison opened a drugstore with a soda fountain in Waco and hired Charles Alderton as a pharmacist. Ball said it was Alderton who actually invented the Dr Pepper formula after customers tired of the old fruit flavors.

It became so popular that they brought in a beverage chemist to help mass produce the syrup and bottle the drink. Dr Pepper Co. moved to Dallas in 1923, merged with Seven-Up in 1988 and now is the nation's third-largest soft drink company, with sales above $40 billion.

But there's one fatal flaw in the company history. Neff found a reference to the Pepper family in Hardesty's Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia. It shows that Dr. Pepper's only daughter at the time would have been in elementary school about the time Morrison worked at the drugstore.

"I never saw that information until about four weeks ago," said Ball from his Dallas office. "That's a revelation to us."

Rebecca Heldreth, whose mother owns the drugstore, said she has joined the local historical society and is researching the records in an attempt to prove the Dr Pepper formula was first concocted in Rural Retreat.