More than 125 years ago, Coca-Cola introduced its brand-new refreshing soft drink with painted advertising wall murals in towns and communities across the country, particularly in the rural South. By 1910, a quarter of The Coca-Cola Company’s advertising budget was dedicated to wall murals with seemingly every town and crossroads having its own Coca-Cola sign painted on the side of a building. Candler, founder of the Coca-Cola Company, once famously boasted that a motion picture couldn’t be made anywhere in America without capturing the image of a Coca-Cola wall mural advertisement. Thousands of these iconic advertising murals remain but many have become faded ‘ghost signs ‘. At one point there were around 16,000 Coca-Cola wall murals across the country and unfortunately, over the years, a lot of those signs faded away and that’s where they came up with term “ghost signs”. Thankfully, more and more are beginning to be restored to their former glory.
This mural (11’7″ x 12’5″) was created by Joe Kilday and was sponsored by the Tennessee Arts Commission’s FY21 Arts Build Communities grant and was managed by Greene County Partnership.
