Although no soda bottling plants remain, Carbon County had many only a generation ago.

 This is the second part of a five part series on the soft drink “pop” industry in Carbon County.

 

Part 2 – Lewie’s and Moxie in Lehighton

 Into the late 1940s, L.H. “Lewie” Dunbar produced a variety of soda pop flavors at his bottling plant at 248 S. 4th St in Lehighton, a building that is now the for Dance With Kim studio.

Chiefly under the Lewie’s brand, Dunbar produced a variety of flavors including: cream, birch, orange and lemon-lime. Craig Gilham now operates the Dunbar Bottling Company in Lehighton. In 1950, his father, Mel Gilham, purchased the company.

After WWII, Mel Gilham returned from the Marines and went to business school to learn office machinery repair. One thing led to another and he became a bill collector and, one day, was assigned to collect a debt from the L.H. Dunbar Bottling Company.

Lewis had passed away and his wife was struggling to run the business, which consisted of the Lewie’s Bottling Company, franchise bottling of the orange soda, Whistle, and distributor sales of beer. Gilham bought the business.

The L. H. Dunbar Building had once been a car garage. Mel Gilham wanted to make the second floor into an apartment and had to remove a stock of Chevy parts. 

When son, Craig Gilham, was ten, he helped in his father’s bottling plant. His job was to load the empties. 

“I took the empty soda bottles and put a couple of cases up so I could reach the bottle washer,” said Craig. “I had a little wire that I used to pull out the straws or anything that people put in the bottle. Then I’d turn them upside down and put them onto a conveyor belt that had holes to accept the neck of the bottles.” 

The conveyor fed the bottles through the bottle washer where it was washed with hot water and caustic soda. Then it dropped into a tray that stood the bottles upright onto a flat conveyor where it moved to the rotary turntable filling station and the crowning station. 

The Gilhams made their own flavored syrups. Craig remembers carrying heavy bags of sugar to a room on the second floor where it was emptied into a tank with coloring and flavoring, and mixed with an auger. The syrup would feed by gravity to the filling station below.

Mel Gilham continued the bottling operation until around 1966, when he decided that he couldn’t compete against the well-advertised national brands.

Dunbar is a major distributor of Moxie, one of the earliest sodas mass marketed in the U.S. and one that was once bottled in Lehighton at the Lehighton Bottling Company on Bridge Street by the Ott family. Its bittersweet herb taste derived from the gentian root is reminiscent of the early days when sparkling water was considered a health beverage.

Lehighton had other bottling companies including the Carbon Bottling Company operated by the Ripkey family off Mahoning St. and a bottling company on Bridge St. operated by Lewis Dunbar’s brother Duddy.