Folks around Fayette in northwest-central Alabama take plenty of hometown pride in the sweet, golden syrup that has earned their small town of 4,200 the nickname “Syrup City.”

As well they should.

“It’s a 100-year-old company,” Temple Bowling, a co-owner of Fayette’s venerable Golden Eagle Syrup Co., says. “Those aren’t sitting around everywhere.”

Golden Eagle Syrup hasn’t hit a hundred quite yet – the company won’t celebrate its centennial for another three years – but Bowling’s point is on the money.

Small-town, family-owned businesses like the one Golden Eagle Syrup founders Victor and Lucy Patterson started in a wooden shed behind their family home in 1928 are, in a manner of speaking, rare birds.

That’s the big reason why Bowling and co-owner John Blevins pooled their resources and bought Golden Eagle from the company’s previous owners 14 years ago.

“We weren’t buying it from the standpoint of, ‘We want to make money,‘” Bowling recalls. “We bought it from the standpoint of, ‘We want to preserve it.’

“It’s in a small town,” he adds. “It’s a great product. It’s got a great brand name. We thought it would be a fun little hobby because we’re both tinkerers. We like to mess with things and figure out how things work.”

‘A Syrup Without an Equal’

Victor Patterson was somewhat of a tinkerer, too.

A Fayette County native who served in the U.S. Army during World War I, Patterson married Lucy Bobo of Fayette upon his return home from the war, and he started working with the Alabama Highway Department.

The story goes that all the popular table syrups back in the 1920s gave Patterson an upset stomach, so he and his wife started experimenting in their kitchen until they hit upon the magical blend of corn syrup, cane sugar syrup, cane molasses and honey that became what they would call Golden Eagle Syrup.

The “golden” referred to the syrup’s regal color, and the “eagle” symbolized that their syrup soared above the rest, according to Golden Eagle lore.

“A Syrup Without an Equal for Any Meal,” Patterson boasted of his sweet, honey-hued concoction, tacking on the slogan that has endured for nearly a century: “Pride of Alabama.”

After their fledgling syrup business took off, the Pattersons outgrew that little shed in the back of their house, and in 1944, they moved their manufacturing operations to a vacant brick building that had previously been a railway warehouse in downtown Fayette.

More than 80 years later, that building is still home to Golden Eagle Syrup, and a colorful mural along an exterior wall pays homage to the company and its founders.

After the Pattersons died, their children – son Victor Patterson Jr., daughter Jeanie Patterson Newell, and her husband, Herbert Newell – kept the business in the Patterson family until they sold it in 1986.

Over the next 25 years, Golden Eagle Syrup had a series of owners.

Then, another family stepped up to continue the tradition that Victor and Lucy Patterson began.

A change of ownership

Temple Bowling, who grew up in Tennessee, confesses that he did not know anything about Golden Eagle Syrup until he met his wife, Fayette County native Kimberly Tyner, while they were students at Auburn University in the early 1990s.

“We came home (to her house), and they had Golden Eagle,” he recalls. “It was like, ‘That’s cool. And they still make it in Fayette?‘”

Kimberly grew up in Berry, about 20 minutes down County Road 26 from Fayette, and five years after she and Temple got married, the Bowlings moved to Fayette County in 2001 to raise their three children – sons Temple VI and Walt and their newborn daughter, Tyner.

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Vic Herren, the principal at Berry High School, and Trent Mobley, a pharmacist in Fayette, co-owned Golden Eagle Syrup back then, and Bowling would occasionally stop by the downtown factory to help his friend Herren on the production line.

“I’d worked there with Vic, helping him run syrup, just out of curiosity,” Bowling says. “And I loved it. I thought it was the neatest thing and had tremendous potential.”

Later, Bowling told his friend Herren that if he and Mobley ever decided to sell, he was interested in buying.

Finally, in 2011, Bowling got his chance after another potential buyer failed three times to come through with a deal.

“After that third time, I called Vic and said, ‘That’s three strikes. He’s out,‘” Bowling remembers. “I said, ‘I’ll take it.‘”

At the time, Bowling was working for BL Harbert International construction company in Birmingham, where John Blevins was his boss and mentor.

When he told Blevins that he had an opportunity to buy Golden Eagle Syrup, Blevins responded by asking if he needed a partner to go in with him.

“And I was like, ‘Yeah, because I’m not sure how I’m gonna buy it, but I know I want it,‘” Bowling recalls.

A family-run business

Blevins — who subsequently founded and serves as executive director of Sweetwater Outreach, a nonprofit that helps provide clean water to underdeveloped countries in Africa – helps on the production line at the Golden Eagle Syrup plant and keeps all the equipment working.

“He spends a lot of time in Africa,” Bowling says, “but when he’s back home, he’s there running syrup.”

Blevins calls it his “manual labor therapy.”

Bowling, meanwhile, manages the business side of their operation, including developing new products to expand the Golden Eagle Syrup brand.

Kimberly Bowling, Temple’s wife, has run the production line since her husband bought the business, learning how it was done from longtime Golden Eagle employees Martha Kimbrell and Annie Wright, who have since retired. (Wright died earlier this year.)

“She’s a trouper,” Temple Bowling says of his wife. “She learned how to make syrup, and every jar that’s ever been made, she’s been here.”

The Bowlings’ daughter, Tyner, who started out putting stickers on boxes of syrup when she was 11 years old, joined the company as operations manager after she graduated from Auburn University in 2023 with a degree in public relations.

“I did not think that I would come back to a small town to run a syrup company,” she says. “It wasn’t really on my radar until probably the end of my sophomore year, start of my junior year of college. Then it clicked for me: This is something I wanted to do.”

Hers is a job title that includes everything from ordering supplies and ingredients to tracking shipments and distribution to managing the social media accounts and merchandise sales.

“When people call and ask to speak to someone in the shipping department or speak to someone in sales or speak to someone in marketing, I always joke that I just need to get a different hat and turn around and put a new hat on,” she says. “Every day is different.”

Caramel corn and pecan pies

Always looking for new ways to grow the brand, the company has expanded its product line in recent years, introducing its Golden Eagle caramel corn in 2021 and its Golden Eagle mini pecan pies two years later.

The caramel corn was inspired by a recipe from Kimberly Bowling.

“Kimberly used to make caramel corn with Golden Eagle in the fall and share it with friends, and everybody raved about it,” her husband says. “So I said, ‘Why don’t we do caramel corn?’ . . . When we launched it, we sold more caramel corn that year than we sold syrup.”

Then, two years ago, Golden Eagle teamed with another longtime, family-owned Alabama business, Whaley Pecan Company in Troy, to make the mini pecan pies.

Since Golden Eagle is the preferred syrup in many Southern pecan pie recipes, the partnership with Whaley Pecan was a natural.

“They’re a family company, and I really wanted to team up with another small business on something that can benefit them and us,” Bowling says. “I want us both to do well.”

Golden Eagle has also partnered with Blue Monarch — a Monteagle, Tenn.-based residential recovery program that helps women break the cycle of addiction and abuse — to come up with a Golden Eagle Syrup blend of Blue Monarch’s Out of the Blue Granola, which is made by women in the program.

Blue Monarch’s “Granola with a Purpose” not only helps women in the program earn an income but teaches them to be self-sufficient.

The Golden Eagle Syrup/Out of the Blue Granola should be available later this fall, Temple Bowling says.

A taste of home

Bowling also owns Liberty Construction, an industrial construction business that takes him all over the South and the Midwest, and when he’s out on the road and his clients see that blue-and-yellow Golden Eagle Syrup tag on the front of his truck, it often sparks a conversation.

He likes to tell the story about the security guard he met at a plant in Woodville, Ohio.

“The guy saw the front tag on the truck, and he said, ‘How do you know about Golden Eagle Syrup?‘” Bowling recalls. “And I was like, ‘How do you know about Golden Eagle Syrup?‘”

The security guard went on to share a story about an uncle who used to bring Golden Eagle Syrup care packages with him whenever he came to visit from Alabama.

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While Golden Eagle’s retail distribution is mainly limited to grocery stores throughout Alabama and in parts of Mississippi and Tennessee, its online reach is nationwide.

The company ships its syrup to customers from California to New York and most, if not all, states in between.

“Even foreign countries,” Bowling adds. “We ship to Korea and Germany and Japan and England.”

To many of those customers, Golden Eagle is more than a syrup they pour on their pancakes or ladle on their biscuits, Bowling says.

It’s a taste of home.

“People go, ‘I remember going to my grandparents’ house and them always having your syrup on the table, and it takes me back,‘” he says.

“When they see our product, it’s not just a product,” he adds. “It’s the memories that come back with the product.”

A syrup, as Victor Patterson called it, without an equal.

The Pride of Alabama.