Ned L. Irwin

The Benwood Foundation is a charitable Chattanooga foundation created in 1944 by Coca-Cola bottling magnate George Thomas Hunter in memory of his uncle and aunt, pioneer bottler Benjamin Franklin Thomas and Anne Taylor Jones Thomas. The name Benwood was taken…

Founded in 1903, Chattanooga Bakery Company is best known for the production of a single product--Moon Pies. The company began operations as an attempt at vertical integration by Chattanooga's Mountain City Flour Mill in an attempt to take advantage of…

This significant Chattanooga business was founded in 1901 by Charles Rief to provide glass bottles for his brewery. Soon the company also began producing bottles for the infant Coca-Cola bottling industry, established in the city in 1899. With the advent…

In 1879 Chattanooga businessman Zeboim Cartter Patten and a group of friends established the Chattanooga Medicine Company. Its first two products, Black-Draught and Wine of Cardui, were so successful that they were sold well into the twentieth century. Patten procured…

On July 21, 1899, Chattanooga attorneys Benjamin F. Thomas and Joseph B. Whitehead signed an agreement with Asa Candler, president of the Coca-Cola Company, to receive exclusive rights to bottle the soft drink throughout most of the United States. Fellow…

John Haywood, pioneer jurist and historian of early Tennessee history, was born in Halifax County, North Carolina in 1762, the son of prosperous tobacco producer Egbert Haywood. Despite limited educational opportunities on the colonial frontier, Haywood taught himself law and…

Chattanooga businessman and philanthropist George Thomas Hunter was the nephew of pioneer Coca-Cola bottler Benjamin Franklin Thomas. A native of Maysville, Kentucky, Hunter joined his childless uncle and aunt in Chattanooga in 1904, becoming a surrogate son and business heir.…

This Chattanooga-based hamburger chain was founded in 1932 by Rodolph B. Davenport Jr. and J. Glenn Sherrill. Loosely patterned after the successful midwestern White Castle hamburger chain which had begun in 1921 in Wichita, Kansas, Krystal capitalized on the economic…

Chattanooga capitalist and philanthropist John Thomas Lupton was born near Winchester, Virginia in 1862. Lupton received a law degree from the University of Virginia and settled in Chattanooga in 1887, following a visit to the home of a fellow student,…

The Chattanooga-based Lyndhurst Foundation was organized in 1978 by Coca-Cola Bottling heir John T. (Jack) Lupton II and family following the death of his parents, Thomas Cartter Lupton and Margaret Rawlings Lupton. Named for the former Lupton family estate in…

Z. Cartter Patten, prominent Chattanooga industrialist and capitalist, was born in Wilna, New York, and educated at Lawville Academy. During the Civil War, he served with the 115th Illinois Infantry and the 149th New York Infantry regiments. Patten first saw…

John Marks Templeton, financial executive, investor, and philanthropist, was born in Winchester on November 29, 1912, the son of Harvey and Vella Handly Templeton. He graduated from Yale University in 1934 and from Oxford University in 1936, where he studied…

Chattanooga philanthropist Anne Taylor Jones Thomas was a native of Cincinnati, Ohio. Anne Thomas met her future husband, Benjamin Franklin Thomas, while he was attending law school at the University of Cincinnati. The couple married in 1894 in Chattanooga. She…

Chattanooga businessman and industrialist Benjamin F. Thomas pioneered the development of the Coca-Cola bottling industry in America. A native of Maysville, Kentucky, Thomas began his business career as a bank clerk, stone quarry operator, and manager of a hosiery mill.…

Chattanooga attorney and businessman Joseph B. Whitehead, along with Benjamin F. Thomas and J. T. Lupton, pioneered the Coca-Cola bottling industry. Born in Oxford, Mississippi, he received a law degree from the University of Mississippi. In the late 1880s he…