A National Treasure

Poking through antiques stores while traveling through the Texas Panhandle, Bill Waters stumbled across a tattered old ledger book filled with formulas. Not being much for readin', he still recognized the confusing symbols and complicated figures for something that may be important to thinkin' folks. Waters bought it for $200, suspecting he could resell it for five times that. Turns out, his inkling about the book's value was more spot on than he knew, when he eventually discovered the book came from the Waco, Texas drugstore where Dr Pepper was invented and includes a recipe titled "D Peppers Pepsin Bitters." Normally, his gut instinct was only good for locating rest areas on the interstate and expecting rainfall.

"I began feeling like I had a national treasure," said Waters. Yes, a drink formula from century ago for the nation's 6th best selling flavor...I'm surprised Nic Cage hasn't sought it out sooner.

Dr Pepper's manufacturer says the recipe is not the secret formula for the modern day soft drink, but the 8book is expected to sell between $50,000 to $75,000 when it goes up for auction next week. "It probably has specks of the original concoction on its pages," Waters said. He discovered the book, its yellowed pages stained brown on the edges, underneath a wooden medicine bottle crate in a Shamrock antiques store last summer. A couple months after buying it, he took a closer look as he prepared to sell it on eBay. There were several sheets with letterheads hinting at its past, like a page from a prescription pad from a Waco store titled "W.B. Morrison & Co. Old Corner Drug Store." An search revealed Dr Pepper, first served in 1885, was invented at the Old Corner Drug Store in Waco by a pharmacist named Charles Alderton. Wade Morrison was a store owner.

Faded letters on the book's fraying brown cover say "Castles Formulas." John Castles was a partner of Morrison's for a time and was a druggist at that location as early as 1880, said Mary Beth Webster, who (given this economy is surprisingly employed as) collections manager at the Dr Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute in Waco. As he gathered more information, Waters took a slower turn through the book's more than 360 pages, which are filled with formulas for everything from piano polish to a hair restorer to a cough syrup. He eventually spotted the "D Peppers Pepsin Bitters" formula. "It took three or four days before I actually realized what I had there," Waters said. Yep, just a few ingredients set Dr. Pepper apart form caustic polish.

The recipe written in cursive in the ledger book is hard to make out, but ingredients seem to include mandrake root, sweet flag root and syrup. It isn't a recipe for a soft drink, says Greg Artkop, a spokesman for the Dr Pepper Snapple Group. He said it's likely instead a recipe for a bitter digestive that bears the Dr Pepper name. Oh snap! Artkop said the recipe certainly bears no resemblance to any Dr Pepper recipes the company knows of. The drink's 23-flavor blend is a closely guarded secret, only known by three Dr Pepper employees, he said. And upon pain of death would not reveal the secret.

Michael Riley, "chief cataloger and historian" for Heritage Auction Galleries, said they think it's an early recipe for Dr Pepper. "We just feel like it's the earliest version of it," he said. Riley hasn't, however, tested that theory by trying to mix up a batch. Neither has Waters; he's thought about it but would need to find someone to decipher all the handwriting. And then again, nobody wants to drink piano polish or a hair tonic.

Riley said the book was probably started around 1880 and used through the 1890s. It's not known who wrote the Dr Pepper recipe in the book, but they don't think it was the handwriting of Alderton or Morrison. Some of the formulas have Alderton's name after them. At first, Alderton's drink inspired by the smells in the drugstore was called "a Waco." "People would come in and say, 'Shoot me a Waco,'" Riley said. Soon renamed Dr Pepper, the drink caught on and other stores in town began selling it. Eventually, Alderton got out of the Dr Pepper business and Morrison and a man named Robert Lazenby started a bottling company in 1891.