Piedmont Pit Stops: The sweet story of Cheerwine, North Carolina's homegrown soft drink

It’s summertime, and that means travel season is upon us. For our new series Piedmont Pit Stops, we’re hitting the road, exploring the hidden gems and landmarks that define the region. 

First stop: Salisbury, where the iconic cherry-flavored soft drink Cheerwine was created over 100 years ago.  

On Main Street

Each May, tens of thousands of visitors descend on the town for the Cheerwine Festival. At this year’s event, a long line has formed in front of Southern SweeTees Bakery stand. It’s easy to see why:

“We have Cheerwine lemonade, Cheerwine lemonade popsicles, Cheerwine pound cake,” says Tessa Pittman, owner of SweeTees. “Oh my goodness, we did try to do everything Cheerwine.”

Pittman is one of dozens of vendors that set up tents this year along Salisbury’s streets to serve loyal Cheerwine fans. Like a lot of attendees, her experience with the sweet drink goes way back. 

“My grandpa and I used to drink them out of the bottles and we put peanuts in them and that's a memory that I always have with him as a child.”

That’s the thing about Cheerwine — its following is about more than its flavor. Joy Harper, Cheerwine’s marketing director, says for many the drink evokes feelings of home.

“It’s a great welcome to the South and North Carolina," she says. "People have incorporated it into their family traditions for years.”

The drink has been a central part of Harper’s family traditions too — she is the great-great-granddaughter of the inventor of Cheerwine. Its flavor was a part of her childhood. 

“It's not a sweet cherry, but it's also not a cola. So it's very different from other soft drinks, which I think is one of the reasons why Cheerwine has still been here over 100 years,” she says. “There's nothing else like it.”

The Cheerwine Festival came about as a way to commemorate the drink’s 100th anniversary. Now, Harper says it brings an estimated $5 million in revenue to Salisbury’s economy and draws tens of thousands of people to the city. 

A century-old legacy

For Evin Burleson, the curator of the Rowan Museum, it’s an excuse to share Cheerwine’s place in Salisbury’s history. He says the story begins in the 1910s with a man named Lewis Peeler. 

“Lewis Peeler was a businessman,” he says. “He owned a general store and most likely an old distillery along the railroad tracks.” 

Peeler had been manufacturing a soft drink called Mint-Cola. But as World War I broke out, experts were predicting a sugar shortage and Peeler was getting worried. 

“So they looked for alternatives and according to this family legend, a traveling salesman from St. Louis came through Salisbury with an almond syrup,” he says. “And it was very very sweet but you didn’t have to add any extra sugar.” 

Peeler learned that he could replace sugar with flavor, and ran with the idea. In 1917, he created a cherry-flavored lightly carbonated soft drink and named it Cheerwine because:

“It would make you cheerful, and it looks like wine,” Burleson says. 

By the 1920s, the red beverage became Peeler’s only focus and he turned toward expansion. Burleson said at first they tried using trains. 

“With trains, you will lose quite a bit of product just from jostling around glass bottles on train beds,” he says. “So essentially every little town that wanted Cheerwine opened its own Cheerwine bottling plant.”

Soon bottling plants opened up as far west as Texas.

“And then during World War II, they shut down all of those and sold all the machinery for scrap metal for the war effort and never reopened,” he says. 

And so for decades, Cheerwine stayed a relatively local delicacy. But it attracted fans from all over the country, many of whom encountered it as tourists traveling the state. Soon, the thrill of the hunt became a part of the Cheerwine experience. That’s something Burleson witnessed when his family visited. 

“Every single time they came home, they would load up their van,” he says. “Even if their van was full of people, they would load up the floorboards and the trunk with Cheerwine because they could not get it in northern Alabama.”

Burleson ran into many stories like this when he was first putting together the Cheerwine exhibit at the Rowan Museum in 2017. It’s now a standard part of the festival that attracts winding lines each year. 

The Rowan Museum

“We have some really cool things,” he says, pointing to the glass display cases in the museum’s basement. “This is an original, probably 40s or 50s order pad from a delivery man here in Salisbury. And you would just mark off what you wanted and they would deliver it to you.”

The display also contains Cheerwine’s original glass bottles and an apron worn by factory workers in the brand’s early days. And that’s just one of the cases. Several more line the hallways containing items ranging from sponsored NASCAR uniforms to calendars. 

Burleson says the exhibit and the festival give the community a reason to celebrate what makes Salisbury unique. 

“If you're from this area and you go anywhere, and if you know anyone that likes sodas, and you’re like, 'Oh, have you ever had Cheerwine? Well, then you know Salisbury, North Carolina,' which is very, very cool,” he says.

Nowadays, the Cheerwine name has expanded far beyond North Carolina’s borders. The company signed a distribution deal with PepsiCo in 2011, and the drink can now be found in grocery stores in much of the Southeast and in Cracker Barrels nationwide.

The Cheerwine Festival is held each year in May. The Rowan Museum stages an expanded Cheerwine exhibit for the festival, but its permanent display can be viewed year-round.