From 1924 to 1933, the lot at the corner of Lee County Road 147 and U.S. Highway 280 held an impressive roadside attraction: The world’s largest Nehi bottle.

The 64-foot-high, bottle-shaped building was constructed as a promotion for the Nehi Cola brand, but it served the community as a grocery, gas station and housing for the store’s owners for nearly a decade. Before long, people began calling that corner “The Bottle” and the name stuck.

Today, after 100 years, the lot where the bottle stood is empty except for a historical marker. But you can still find the name on Alabama maps – just type the intersection into a mapping app and you’ll see that intersection labeled “The Bottle.”

In 2010, I interviewed the daughter of the man who donated the piece of property for the bottle to a Nehi salesman. Margaret Bradley Earnest was 97 years old when I spoke with her. She lived to be 100 years old and died in 2013.

Here is a little of what she recalled: Margaret Bradley was 11 years old in 1924 when a man arrived at the family farm in Farmville, Alabama, to speak to her father, W.W. Bradley. The man had come to ask her father if he could use an outer parcel of his land for a building project. Bradley agreed.

“My father was just generous like that,” Margaret recalled. “He just gave it to him. He never did get any rent on it.”

The man who approached Mr. Bradley was John F. Williams, the owner of the Nehi Bottling Company in Opelika. Margaret told me Williams went by the nickname “Chero-Cola” Williams after the name of the company that owned Nehi products at that time.

Williams wanted to use the giant bottle as a roadside advertisement. The Nehi line of fruit-flavored soft drinks was introduced the same year in orange, grape, root beer, peach, and other flavors.

It became an instant hit, and the company changed its name to Nehi Corp. in 1928. When Nehi sales softened during the Great Depression, Nehi makes reformulated their failed Chero-Cola and named it Royal Crown Cola. The company again changed its name, this time to Royal Crown Cola Co.

The bottle was 49 feet in circumference at the base and 16 feet around at the cap on top. It said NEHI Beverages on the outside. Visitors were allowed to tour the bottle, climbing to the top of the bottle neck to see a 360-degree view of the countryside.

“The winding stairs would go to the top and you could remove the little cap and look out and see Auburn and Opelika,” Margaret said.

The Bottle was made of wood and painted orange. Not one to waste space, Williams built in a gas station and store on the first floor and an apartment for the store’s managers on the second floor. It had no electricity.

Margaret says she thought it was normal to live next to a giant bottle.

“I just thought everybody had a bottle,” she told me with a laugh.

At one point, there was a small barbecue stand in the Bottle that was operated by her widowed aunt, Hattie Bocsford Wilson.

One morning in 1933, the newly married Margaret Bradley Earnest was still living on the family farm when she saw smoke coming from the intersection. She rushed to the scene to be sure her aunt was safe. She was. She had crawled from a second-story window and jumped into a sheet held beneath the window by neighbors.

No one was injured that day, but the Bottle was destroyed. In 2015, Auburn historians erected a historical marker on the empty lot that tells the story of The Bottle.