Don't ya wanna be a Pepper too?

Another of Waco's claims to fame is that Dr. Pepper soft drink was invented here at the Old Corner Drugstore in 1885. This building was built in 1906 for bottling soda and is now a museum. On the side of the building you can see a section of lighter yellow bricks. That's the part that was rebuilt after a tornado came through in 1953, taking off a large section of the roof. The building was closed for a long time and in 1991 opened as a museum.

The photo here is kind of hard to see. It's an artesian well right in the building. It's now covered with plexiglass so it makes a kind of reflection. The well was the source of water for the bottling company but in the 1920s, the city of Waco declared all downtown wells had to be covered. So they filled it with broken bottles and capped it with a 4-inch thick iron circle, then put machinery on top of it. It took some sleuthing from Baylor University to uncover it and restore it.