Coca-Cola. The logo and the beverage are familiar around the globe. The name of this internationally famous soft drink and business empire and the name of the late Joseph Augustus Biedenharn are inseparably linked. The story of the bottled beverage that "Mr. Joe," as he was to be called, was to popularize, and the story of the business enterprises that he was to inaugurate, began quietly in the summer of 1894 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, a small Southern port city nestled in the hilly terrain along the east bank of the Mississippi River.

Not even dimly did this young first-generation American - the son of a father emigrated from Germany and a mother emigrated from Denmark - foresee the dramatic results that would stem from his practical business conception of bottling and widely marketing the locally popular soda fountain drink Coca-Cola. His astute entrepeneurial venture was to revolutionize the soft drink bottling industry, then in its infancy.

The successful enterprises founded upon his innovative venture have affected not only the world of business. They also affected the world of the fine arts by making possible the realization of the dream of his musically talented daughter, Emy-Lou, whose dreams he encouraged and underwrote by his financial generosity. The Coca-Cola industry, built upon the foundation he laid, and his own business enterprises stand as memorials to this man's contributions to the world of trade. The Biedenharn Home, The Bible Museum, and the ELsong Garden and Conservatory, located in Monroe, Louisiana, his home for most of his adult life, stand as memorials to his contributions to the world of the arts.

The Founder of the Biedenharn clan and businesses in America was Herman Henry, his son Joseph rapidly came to the forefront as the business innovator and as the leader of this closely knit family.  Practicing many of the commendable traits of character inherited from his father stood Joe well through out his life, earning him respect as a devoted family man, a practical and ethical business man, and a dedicated community leader.  These traits were reflected in the actions of his life and instilled by precept and example in the members of his family.

Joseph Augustus Biedenharn, Herman Henry's first son and third of twelve children, was born on December 13, 1866.

At an early age, Joe was allowed to mend shoes to earn spending money. While he did not share his father's interest in boots and shoes, he was deeply fascinated by the confectionery store.  Under his Uncle Henry's guidance, he quickly learned the art of making, baking and icing elaborate confections.  He was so much captivated by the baker's art that at the age of fourteen he dropped out of school to begin working full-time with his uncle.  Although he had only a small amount of formal school work, a not unusual situation at the time, he read widely and acquired a broad, solid general education.

Gradually, Joe began to take on greater responsibility for the operation of the confectionery business.  When Uncle Henry died on December 25, 1888, he left his share of the confectionery store to Joe.  The name of the business was changed from Biedenharn & Brother to Biedenharn & Son.  In 1890, at the age of twenty-two, Joe became manager and soon added a soda fountain in connection with the wholesale candy company.

In 1890, Joe and his father built a two-story brick building at 218-220 Washigton Street to house the joint operations of the two successful businesses - boots and shoes and confectionery.  Under the supervision of Joe, an astute manager and superb salesman, the candy company flourished, operating a bakery - which made and sold a wide variety of cakes, pies, and candies- and a wholesale grocery business.  Their goods were delivered to city customers by wagon, but most of the goods, which were for out-of-town customers, were shipped by train or riverboat.

Prior to assuming managership of the business, Joe, on July 31,1889, had married petite and beautiful Anne Schlottman, an accomplished young pianist, also of Vicksburg. She was born on November 27, 1870.  Joe and Anne had four children:  Henry Alvin, Malcolm Scott, Emma Louise(Emy-Lou), and Bernard William, born on January 2, 1907.

The three sons became involved with and successful in the family businesses. The daughter, apparently inheriting hermother's musical talents, studied voice in Boston, Massachusetts, and in London, England, eventually achieving a distinguished career, both in the United States and in Europe, as a Wagnerian contralto.  In April, 1932, she made her formal European debut, quite appropriately, in Copenhagen, Denmark,her paternal grandmother's homeland.

As a part of his local confectionery operations, Joe Biedenharn had long sold soda fountain drinks -carbonated water flavored with a variety of syrups. Until one of those fortunate destiny-changing events that sometimes occur in human lives occurred in his life in 1891, he had given no thought to entering the business that would ultimately become a major component of his enterprises and launch a world-famous industry, the bottling and retailing of Coca-Cola. He entered the bottling business, he once said, in self defense.

The fortuitous incident that triggered his entry into this field occurred in late June,1891.  Three customers gave him orders for a Fourth of July picnic they were planning for their plantation workers.  Each order included ten cases of soda water.  Anticipating no problem in handling this routine order, Joe took it and called the local bottling company.  Instead of receiving the bottled drinks, he received a reply that the bottler could not fill his thirty-case order because of the heavy demands of the holiday business.  Chagrined, Joe had to resort to the expedient of giving each of these three valued customers a box of lemons, a sack of sugar, and some coloring and suggesting that they serve pink lemonade, instead of bottled soda water, at their picnics.

The incident so irritated Joe that he decided to go into the soda water bottling business himself. Never one to delay action once he had made a decision, he acted immediately.  Within thirty days, the Biedenharn Candy Company secured second hand equipment from St. Louis and began bottling and distributing lemon, strawberry, and sarsaparilla soda water.

Five years prior to the 1891 incident in Vicksburg which precipitated Joe's entry into the soft drink bottling business, developments had occurred in Atlanta, Georgia, that would later change the course of the career Joe was pursuing and lead him to earn a special place in history.

In 1886, John S. Pemberton, an Atlanta pharmacist, formulated a drink called "Coca-Cola."  The Coca-Cola syrup was mixed with carbonated water and sold in soda fountains in Atlanta drug stores.  According to legend, Pemberton first produced the syrup in a three-legged pot in his backyard. His partner and bookkeeper, Frank M. Robinson, suggested the name "Coca-Cola" and penned the logo in flowing Spencerian script.

By 1891, Asa G. Candler in Atlanta had acquired complete legal interest in Coca-Cola for the sum of $2,300.  In 1892, he incorporated the Coca-Cola Company.

The experience of Joe Biedenharn with Coca-Cola began before he entered the soda water bottling business.  In 1890, Samuel Candler Dobbs, a Coca-Cola salesman from Atlanta, persuaded Joe to try a five-gallon keg of Coca-Cola syrup.  Joe dispensed the syrup at the soda fountain in the small retail section of his store. The experiment was successful, and the Biedenharn Candy Company began to order Coca-Cola syrup regularly.

Asa Candler was so impressed with the success of the sales of Coca-Cola syrup in Vicksburg that he personally visited with Joe Biedenharn and asked him to job Coca-Cola syrup to the soda fountains in the area.  The result of the visit was an agreement that the Biedenharn Candy Company would purchase not fewer than 2,000 gallons of Coca-Cola syrup during a twelve-month period and at the end of the period the Company would receive a rebate of twenty-five cents a gallon.  Such a deal, of course, interested Joe, and he enthusiastically promoted the product.  In later years, he reported that he always exceeded the quota, and, consequently, his profits from the sales were favorable.

Joe observed how on hot summer days townspeople in Vicksburg came to the various soda fountains and asked for Coca-Cola.  His logical mind concluded that if Coca-Cola was popular with the townspeople it would be equally well received by the country folks if only they could have easy access to it.

Suddenly, in 1894, an idea hit Joe.  Ever the practical businessman, he asked himself, not surprisingly, a practical business question:  Why not bottle Coca-Cola so that everyone could enjoy the tasty and refreshing carbonated cold drink - not only the townspeople and the country people in the immediate vicinity of Vicksburg, who could come into the store and buy it at the fountain, but also the people who lived at too great a distance to come into the store.

Implementation of his idea was neither difficult nor expensive.  In fact, it was easy and inexpensive:  He was already bottling soda water; he had the bottling machinery, the gas, the bottles, and the crates; and he had the Coca-Cola syrup.

In the summer of 1894, Joe Biedenharn put Coca-Cola into bottles, becoming the first person to bottle the popular beverage.

Twenty-seven-year-old Joe did not realize the far reaching impact of what he was doing when he poured the Coca-Cola syrup and shot the carbonated water into that first bottle. Although no one had preceded him in the Coca-Cola bottling business, many around the world would follow in his footsteps.  His simple act of putting Coca-Cola into bottles enabled the famous Coca-Cola trademark to become a symbol universally recognized and the beverage which it represents to become a product readily available to and daily enjoyed by all ranks of people around the globe.

Joe began filling ten-and-one-half-ounce, wire-stoppered Hutchinson bottles - the same bottles he was using for his soda water drinks - with Coca-Cola.  Short-necked bottles with a wire hook protruding from the mouth, they had "Registered" embossed across the shoulder and "Biedenharn Candy Co. Vicksburg, Miss." embossed in a circle on the body.  Initially, the bottles were packed upside down in wood in cases.  Made of one-inch dressed lumber and having no partitions, the cases, tall enough to enclose the entire bottles, had false bottoms with holes bored into them just large enough for the necks of the bottles to pass through. Joe sold a case of Coca-Cola for seventy cents and soda water for sixty cents. Retail stores sold the drinks for five cents a bottle.

As a courtesy, Joe sent Mr. Candler two cases of the Coca-Cola he had bottled.  He later commented that Candler wrote back and said, "It was fine."  He then added, "But you know to this day he has never returned my bottles."

The potential for bottled Coca-Cola did not impress Asa Candler; his interest was in selling more Coca-Cola syrup.  On July 21, 1899, Candler, for the sum of one dollar, granted exclusive rights to bottle and sell Coca-Cola in the United States - except Mississippi, Texas, and the New England - to two men in Chattanooga, Tennessee:  Benjamin F. Thomas and Joseph B. Whitehead.  Candler excluded Mississippi because Biedenharn Candy Company was already bottling and distributing Coca-Cola there and he wanted the Company to be able to continue its Coca-Cola bottling operations.

Thomas and Whitehead's agreement with Candler led to the franchising of bottled Coca-Cola.  In 1919, the Candler family sold the Coca-Cola Company, the controller of Coca-Cola syrup, for twenty-five million dollars to a group represented by banker Ernest Woodruff of Atlanta, Georgia.  In 1923, Ernest's son, Robert W., assumed leadership of the Coca-Cola Company.  Under his guidance, Coca-Cola became an international beverage.  Bottle sales exceeded fountain sales for the first time in 1928.

Joe was forty-six years old when he moved to Monroe from Vicksburg.  His sons, Joe, Henry, and Malcolm, operated the bottling company, the candy company, and the realty company.  Following family tradition, young Bernard joined them at an early age.  All of their operations prospered.

Active in his businesses and in the civic, philanthropic, cultural, and religious life of the Monroe community, Joe served as president of the three companies until his death on October 9, 1952.  Henry served as president from 1952 until his death on March 20, 1961.  Malcolm served as secretary-treasurer and general manager of the bottling company from 1913 until his death on April 23, 1950.  Bernard served as chairman of the boards of the companies from 1961 to the time of his death on October 9, 1988. Upon the death of Malcolm, Henry Alvin Biedenharn, Jr., Joe's only grandson, was named general manager of the Ouachita Coca-Cola Bottling Company. His leadership continued until March, 1976, when Henry Alvin Biedenharn, III, was named president and general manager.  Under this fourth-generation guidance, the Monroe operation expanded into additional territories in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi.  The Joe Biedenharn Coca-Cola companies have grown to represent the ninth-largest Coca-Cola bottling operation in the United States.