Asa Candler rose from a rural background to reap a fortune. His windfall came from purchasing the Coca-Cola formula in 1888 and establishing the company that became a national phenomenon in less than a decade. In Formula for Fortune, author Ann Uhry Abrams narrates the life and times of Candler-from his ancestral background to the death of the last of his five children. Formula for Fortune not only shows how he turned his entrepreneurial genius into an empire, but also relates his status in Atlanta, Georgia, as a prominent banker, realtor, philanthropist, civil servant, and mayor. Painting a lively portrait of the past, this biography tells a fascinating American story that covers a century of American and Southern life as seen through the eyes of a middle-class family elevated to prominence by their patriarch's incredible success. It not only provides a peek into the horse-and-buggy days of one of the nation's major corporations, but also follows Coca-Cola's fascinating transformation from patent-medicine to international phenomenon. Family dynamics weave through this drama of love, disappointments, and disaster played out against the background of four wars, a race riot, technological revolutions, and numerous courtroom dramas.
Formula for Fortune
How Asa Candler Discovered Coca-Cola and Turned It into the Wealth His Children EnjoyedBy Ann Uhry AbramsiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Ann Uhry Abrams
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-7168-5Contents
Preface............................................................xiChapter One Farming and Praying...................................1Chapter Two Mixing Concoctions....................................21Chapter Three Serendipity.........................................37Chapter Four Leaving Home.........................................54Chapter Five Changing World.......................................81Chapter Six Creating Families.....................................99Chapter Seven Visions of Grandeur.................................118Chapter Eight Prominence and Prosperity...........................139Chapter Nine In Control...........................................159Chapter Ten Losing Control........................................183Chapter Eleven Misbehavior........................................205Chapter Twelve Trials and Tributes................................226Chapter Thirteen Wild and Unfathomable Things.....................248Chapter Fourteen Murder in Druid Hills............................270Chapter Fifteen And So It Goes....................................284Acknowledgments....................................................299Selected Bibliography..............................................301Abbreviations in Notes.............................................301Endnotes...........................................................307Index..............................................................333
Chapter One
Farming and Praying
Shortly after Asa Griggs Candler opened his gleaming skyscraper in downtown Atlanta in 1906, he orchestrated a ceremony to be held each year on December 6, the birthday of both his parents, an event that merited a brief write-up in the Atlanta Constitution in 1910. Although the article gave only facts and figures, a small stretch of the imagination—enhanced by information about the principal players—brings the ceremony to life. So let's begin this foray into the past by imagining that gathering.
First we notice a milling crowd standing around the elegant marble lobby. The group watches hopefully as Asa Candler Sr.—a short, wiry man, with gray hair and rimless glasses, looking remarkably hardy for a successful businessman pushing sixty—smiles down on the group from his post on the first landing of the staircase. Except for the elegance of his attire and his commanding manner, unknowing observers would have never suspected he was one of the city's wealthiest citizens. Not only has he made a fortune from Coca-Cola, but he is also a prominent banker, realtor, philanthropist, and civil servant. Recently he so successfully completed a two-year term as chairman of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce that people were suggesting he run for mayor. Despite all his accomplishments, Asa Candler managed to retain his distinctive southern drawl and the many colloquialisms that hinted of his humble origins. His own children, along with most of his grandchildren, nieces, and nephews, are present that morning, as are several of his siblings and his dignified wife, Lucy Elizabeth. Near her is their only daughter, Lucy, along with her husband, Bill Owens, an officer in his father-in-law's bank, and their young daughter Elizabeth. Asa's four sons dared not miss this command performance. Although each of the young men acts friendly and cordial to his brothers, the tension between them is palpable. That is especially true of the two oldest, Howard, vice president of the Coca-Cola Company, and the next in line, Asa Jr., called either "Bud" or "Buddie" by the family. He has recently become manager of his father's vast real estate holdings and seems to be happy in his new role. Howard's wife, Flora, stands close by her husband's side, while their son and daughter are having an animated conversation with their Uncle Bud's children, who are there with their mother, Helen. Nearby Walter Candler, now a clerk at his father's bank, chats with one of his cousins, while his pretty but exhausted wife, Eugenia, who left a new daughter at home with a nurse, is watching her two little boys chase around her feet. William—the youngest of Asa Candler's children and the only one of the brothers still single in 1910—stands on the edge of the crowd, having just rushed in from the Coca-Cola plant, where he is treasurer.
The crowd grows quiet when Methodist Bishop Warren Candler, a broad-shouldered bulldog of a man, steps forward to deliver the blessing. Heads bow and children are silenced as, in deep, sonorous tones, Asa's brother asks for the Lord's countenance to shine benevolently upon the descendants of Sam and Martha Candler, so many of whom are grouped about him that day. First he remarks how fortunate they are to have come from such an extraordinary heritage; then he entreats his Maker to bestow special blessings on the souls of his brothers Milton and Noble, who have passed on to dwell with their parents in heaven. Then Bishop Warren prays for the Lord to keep those esteemed parents in his company forever and grant his celestial benevolence on the remaining offspring of Martha and Sam, several being too old or too ill to be there that day. Restless now, the crowd shifts from one foot to the other. Throats clear, someone coughs, feet shuffle, and children giggle, only to be shushed by a firm parental hand. Finally, the bishop utters "amen" in Jesus's name as the assortment of Candlers raise their heads.
Then Asa Candler resumes his position on the staircase to explain that they are gathered for the annual celebration of his parents' birth, since Sam and Martha had both come into the world on the sixth day of December. Unlike his younger brother Warren, Asa's voice is high- pitched and reedy. His blue eyes grow misty as he recalls his childhood at the "old homestead" in Villa Rica in those far-off days before the War Between the States. Then he asks his brothers—John (a former judge and now chief lawyer for Coca-Cola), Bishop Warren, and Willie (a merchant)—along with his sisters Florence and Lizzie to talk about their favorite memories of that vanished childhood world. After they speak, a few of the oldest grandchildren add comments about Martha, the only one of the pair most of them had known. When the recollections end, Asa climbs a few steps higher to solemnly place wreaths on the marble busts of each parent, tucked into niches along the wall of the staircase, near similar statues of such favorite Georgians as General John B. Gordon, Eli Whitney, Alexander Stephens, and Joel Chandler Harris. Then each of the children receive a white flower, and, one at a time, the little boys and girls step onto a temporary platform to insert their blossoms into wreaths draped around the necks of their stone ancestors.
Afterward, Warren delivers a final blessing before the ceremony ends with a flurry of applause. Now little faces wait impatiently, knowing that each year the man they either call "Pawpaw" or "Uncle Asa" distributes a wrapped gift to every child. Clutching their packages and bundled into their winter coats, hats, gloves, scarves, and muffs, three generations of Candlers bid each other good-bye, talking about their plans for the upcoming holiday. Slowly they push through the bronze-trimmed doors into the chilly December day, leaving behind the silent marble busts of the venerated ancestors amidst the hustle and bustle of office workers and bank customers, who brush past them every day. Sam and Martha are left in their staircase niches, staring in stony silence until next year's birthday celebration once more temporarily brings them to life.
This gathering of 1910 has its roots seventy-seven years earlier in another ceremony, that one taking place in the red-clay backwoods of Cherokee County, Georgia. At the time and in that remote place, Martha Beall, who had just celebrated her fourteenth birthday, married twenty-four-year-old Sam Candler. Sam, a recently appointed county sheriff, must have seemed extremely glamorous to a girl raised in the wilderness. Tall, dark, somber, and seemingly wise to the foibles of the world, he was taken with the bright, lively Martha, so tiny and doll-like that when he stood beside her, she barely reached his shoulder. The perky teenager—who readily took to the sheriff's advances—promised to develop into a warm and capable mate. As the oldest child of Noble and Justiana Beall, Martha had spent all of her young life helping around the house. Before she was thirteen, she had been responsible for tending the steady stream of new babies coming into the world almost every year. When she married Sam Candler, her next youngest sister, Eliza, was eleven, and six others were stair-steps down to the youngest baby, Charles, less than five months old. The older members of the Beall brood were the lucky ones, who had managed to survive the hardships of frontier living. Two of their siblings had succumbed during their first year, and little Charles wouldn't remain alive for much longer. Despite all the misfortunes, Justiana Beall would deliver five more babies after her daughter married, and all but one of them grew to be adults.
Martha's father, Noble Beall, had moved to the northwestern Georgia frontier sometime in the late 1820s or early 1830s, when that territory was still under the jurisdiction of the Cherokee Nation. Through the years, the tribe had adapted to the white man's ways, eventually developing a prosperous farming community, replete with a school, printing press, and a newspaper in the Cherokee language. But after prospectors discovered gold there in the late 1820s, the tribe was doomed. In hopes of retaining its land, it sued the state in two separate cases that both ended up in the US Supreme Court. However, these attempts were futile, and Georgia won the right to take over the Cherokee's territory. In rushed the white man, and out went the original inhabitants.
The same gold rush that ousted the Native Americans brought Sam Candler into the former "Indian country," recently designated as Cherokee County by the state legislature. Before drifting northward, Sam had spent several months near the Alabama border in Carroll County, where prospectors had discovered gold on lands recently occupied by the Creeks. Family lore later claimed that he managed one of the mining companies, but chances are he was merely digging alongside the other fortune seekers, one of whom was his younger brother, Ezekiel, also a county sheriff. Having found little precious ore during his first mining experience, Sam convinced Cherokee County authorities that if they would appoint him sheriff, he would strive to remove the Cherokee from their ancestral homes. Conscientious in his new job, he worked diligently to round up the Native Americans and pack them off on the long trek to Oklahoma. But it was a tougher assignment than the young man had anticipated, as his targets often hid in the woods and refused to budge. At one point, Sam supposedly tied a Cherokee man to a bedpost so he wouldn't sneak away. This and other indications of his tough perseverance made such an impression on county authorities that they chose him as their representative in the Georgia legislature, then meeting at the state capital in Milledgeville.
Like most rural southern families, the Candlers and the Bealls were Scotch-Irish farmers, and both families were fiercely proud of their ancestry. One of Martha's paternal forebears, Ninian Beall, had fought for Oliver Cromwell's Scottish brigade during England's seventeenth-century civil war, and when the Stuart monarchy resumed power, he was punished for that service by deportation. Thrown out of his homeland, Ninian crossed the ocean and settled in Calvert (later Prince George's) County, Maryland, where he began farming. Through hard work and fortunate connections, he was able to leave his offspring with valuable land holdings and a prosperous plantation. Many of his descendants dispersed to various parts of the South, and, somewhere down the line, one of them married a cousin of John Adams, thus allowing future generations of Bealls to claim a tenuous kinship to the second American president.
Sam's filial boasts were slightly different from his wife's, since one of his distant ancestors, William Candler, had ended up on the winning side of that same civil war. Awarded a castle in Callan, County Kilkenny, Ireland—for defending his village against Cromwell's invading army—William became a landholding aristocrat. Most of his children and grandchildren remained in the British Isles and mingled freely with Stuart royalty, but Sam's great-great-grandfather, Daniel, shocked his Anglican family by marrying an Irish Catholic, and as a result, he lost his inheritance. Disowned and penniless, he left for America, eventually ending up as a farmer in Wrightsborough, Georgia, about thirty-five miles north of Augusta. Daniel's son, William, bolstered the family's respectability by fighting as an officer in the Continental militia during the American Revolution and by serving as a member of Georgia's first legislature. But his son Daniel, Sam's father, did little to honor the Candler name, since he chose to operate a tavern and participate in frequent barroom brawls, some of them resulting in duels. In one such confrontation, Daniel unwittingly killed a friend, an unfortunate incident that sent him spiraling into a deep depression. Unable to recover and now under suspicion of breaking the law, he killed himself. This heritage of contradictory extremes—producing either alcoholism and self-destruction or temperance and notable achievement—passed intact from generation to generation of Candlers, as did the propensity for chronic depression.
When Daniel Candler took his life in 1816, he left his wife, Sarah, with seven children. Sam, who was only six at the time, was soon to discover that his father's profligate lifestyle had depleted the family funds. To help support her unruly brood, Sarah remarried, moved to Baldwin County near Milledgeville, and soon gave birth to four more daughters. With the constant arrival of new children, the house became so crowded that Sam and some of his siblings were farmed out to relatives. After an unhappy stay with an aunt and uncle, he landed in the home of his first cousin, Ignatius Few, a lawyer and Methodist minister, later to distinguish himself by founding Emory College in Oxford, Georgia. For the impressionable ten- or eleven-year-old boy, the Few household was the antithesis of his own. Few had attended Princeton University and studied afterward in New York City, thus providing his young cousin with a taste for books, tempered by an ardent dose of Methodism. However, this brief exposure to a learned and religious relative did not motivate Sam Candler to follow suit. Instead he went back to live with his mother for a while, until the packed house with all those younger half sisters got to be unbearable, and he left home for good, embarking on a trek that ended in the newly formed Cherokee County, where he began courting the young Martha Beall.
When Noble and Justiana Beall learned that their oldest daughter planned to marry a man ten years her senior, they were understandably opposed. How could they let their able helper marry a wandering gold-seeker, even if he did wear the sheriff's badge and represent the county in the state legislature? But after threatening to disown Martha and have any elopement annulled, Noble Beall—unable to dissuade his determined daughter—grudgingly agreed to host her wedding. As a dowry, he gave the couple a "claybank Indian pony" named Picayune and a slave girl named Mary, possibly a half-breed Cherokee. Sam and Martha wanted to wed on their shared birthday, but local superstition altered their plans, as December 6, 1833, fell on a Friday, and within the frontier culture, weddings on that day were deemed unlucky. Reluctantly, the couple agreed to placate her parents by delaying the ceremony for two days, and they married on December 8. Among the assortment of neighbors attending the wedding at the Beall home were reportedly two Cherokee chiefs in full regalia.
The newlyweds hung around the Beall farm while Sam continued rounding up Cherokee and attending legislative sessions in Milledgeville. But in a short time, Martha's parents decided to move, now that their peaceful rural life had been disrupted by the invading panhandlers. The Bealls relocated farther south in equally new and rugged Campbell (now part of Fulton) County, just west of what fifteen years later would become Atlanta. When her parents moved, Sam and Martha loaded a wagon with their belongings, including the young slave girl and pony, and headed back to Carroll County, where Sam's brother Ezekiel still lived. By the time the young couple arrived, the small vein of gold had been all but depleted, and most of the prospectors had moved on to a more lucrative lode in the foothills near Dahlonega. A few miners, however, did stick around the old pit in a tiny outpost they called Hixville, named after a local tavern owner. At the time, only about three thousand people lived in the entire county, and Hixville was little more than a scruffy collection of shacks. In hopes of transforming the mining enclave into a reputable agricultural community, Sam and Martha banded together with other residents and changed the name to Villa Rica, a Spanish phrase meaning "Town of Riches."
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Excerpted from Formula for Fortuneby Ann Uhry Abrams Copyright © 2012 by Ann Uhry Abrams. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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