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Emory and Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola was originated in 1886 by an Atlanta pharmacist, John S. Pemberton, who touted his drink as a tonic for most common ailments. The drink was sold for five cents a glass at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta.

The Emory connection began with Asa Griggs Candler, an Atlanta pharmacist who secured complete ownership of the business by 1891 for a total cash outlay of $2,300 and the exchange of some proprietary rights. In 1895 he sent the first keg of Coca-Cola syrup ever seen in Oxford, Georgia, to his son and his son’s classmates at Emory College.

In 1914 Asa Candler donated $1 million to make the transformation of Emory College into Emory University possible. He was a longtime member of Emory’s Board of Trustees, and his brother Warren Candler was a president of Emory College and the first chancellor of Emory University. (Letters from 1914–1915 in the Warren Candler Papers include many suggestions for names for the new university. Included among them, ironically, was “Coke,” honoring the Methodist clergyman Thomas Coke.)

The president’s home, Lullwater House, was originally the home of Asa Candler’s son, Walter Turner Candler. It was purchased from the Candler family in 1958.

The Coca-Cola Company was sold in 1919 to a group of investors led by Atlanta businessman Ernest Woodruff. In 1923 Robert Winship Woodruff, son of Ernest Woodruff and former student at Emory College, became president of the company and led it for almost sixty years. In 1979 brothers Robert and George Woodruff made a gift of approximately $105 million to Emory, which at that time was the largest single gift to a single educational institution in the nation’s history.

In 1994 Emory changed the name of its business school to the Goizueta Business School in honor of Roberto C. Goizueta, chair and chief executive officer of The Coca-Cola Company.

The Woodruff gift and the gifts from many other friends and alumni of the University have grown into an endowment valued at more than four and a half billion dollars, placing Emory’s endowment among the ten largest in the United States.


AN OLD EMORY SONG

Emory, Emory, thy future we foretell.
We were raised on Coca-Cola,
so no wonder we raise hell.
When e’er we meet Tech’s engineers,
we drink them off their stool.
So fill your cup, here’s to the luck
of the Coca-Cola School.