Coke Murals See New Life in Farmville

By Crystal Vandegrift, Staff Writer

FARMVILLE – Two Coca-Cola murals in the Town of Farmville have recently been restored.

The murals are located on the side of buildings on North Main Street and a larger one on North Street.

The Coke murals were restored as part of the Town’s clean-up efforts in preparation for next week’s Vice Presidential Debate at Longwood.

At Coca-Cola, painted wall signs were one of the earliest forms of advertising, dating back to the 1890s, according to Phillip Mooney, director of Coca-Cola archives. Owners of properties around the country often rented wall space to advertisers like Coca-Cola. In 1910 approximately 25 percent of the company’s entire advertising budget was devoted to wall signs.

The signs were typically in high-traffic areas — at busy intersections or next to railroad tracks that carried passenger trains from point to point, Mooney explains.

“Every town had the signs. It was sort of a ‘Welcome to our town,’ if you will,” Mooney says. “At Coca-Cola Consolidated, we recognize that these ghost signs are an important part of Coca-Cola’s history. But more importantly, the faded wall murals are part of the history of each of the towns where they exist; often treasured landmarks and nostalgic connections to the past.”

The signs reflected a wide range of characters and mottos, and were often taken from standards manuals and “pounce patterns” books that Coca-Cola provided to its sign painters and bottling companies. The elflike Sprite Boy with the bottle-cap hat was a popular design, as was the slick, mustachioed “Clark Gable” figure. One sign uncovered last year during a restaurant renovation in Suffolk, Va. revealed a late-nineteenth-century design showing the classic capital “C” with “5 cents at all soda fountains” scrawled below it in bold white letters.

The very first Coca-Cola wall mural is believed to have been painted on the side of a drug store in Cartersville, Georgia in 1894.

To commemorate the newly restored murals an All-American Downtown Celebration, sponsored by Coca-Cola, will be held near the North Main Street mural on Oct. 1 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.