The Texas Museum That Holds The History Of This Iconic Soda

Food museums thrive as testaments to culinary yesteryear, bringing waves of nostalgia. Even products still popular today carry intriguing origin stories, including the ever-loved Dr Pepper, which tied with Pepsi in 2024 as America's second favorite soda, snagging 8.34% of the soda market. It's certainly no surprise that a Dr Pepper Museum sweeps visitors along the soft-drink's journey, perching inside the very cradle of Dr Pepper invention: Waco, Texas.

Housed in the original 1906 bottling plant, the quirky Dr Pepper Museum celebrates its history as America's oldest major soft drink, invented right there in Waco. It all started in 1885, more than 20 years before Dr Pepper's spreading popularity demanded a bottling plant of its own, the very place where visitors now roam through the past over three stories of rotating exhibits, vintage ads, hands-on soda-making, more than 300,000 artifacts, and even a bit of optional paranormal storytelling tied to the historic building. 

The massive brick structure in downtown Waco, known officially as the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, holds a listing on the National Register of Historic Places for being the "Home of Dr Pepper." Inside those walls is where the brand's colorful past comes to life — not only as an archive of Dr Pepper's history, but as a lens to broader social structures over the years. One intriguing multimedia exhibit, opened in November 2022, explores the complexities of soda-fountain lunch counters of the 1960s. 

A true-to-life, recreated lunch counter inside the Dr Pepper Museum gives visitors a literal, physical feel for an important part of soda history. Dr Pepper itself was invented at a drugstore soda-fountain lunch counter, credited to Waco pharmacist Charles Alderton inside Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store. Decades later, soda-fountain counters across the American South would become a lightning rod for racial reform. 

The "Sit Down to Take a Stand" exhibit inside the Dr. Pepper Museum, also known as the Waco Lunch Counter Exhibit, is a broad multimedia installation exploring the history of segregated soda fountains and lunch counters. Through photos, recorded oral histories, videos, and artifacts, the exhibit depicts sit‑in protests by Black community leaders, college students, and business owners, which spurred integration of lunch counters in late 1961, a precursor to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

The lunch counter exhibit sits within the soda fountain area, where anyone can enjoy a free Dr Pepper drink from an old-fashioned soda fountain. Drinks are mixed by hand in the style of early 20th-century soda jerks, and there's an option to purchase handmade floats in signature Dr Pepper flavors. At a separate Make-A-Soda lab, guests combine flavored syrups and carbonated water to invent their own drinks. For a chance to meet the Dr Pepper spirits lingering after downtown Waco's devastating 1953 tornado, book the two-hour Paranormal Experience. For more tasty intrigue, check out our Tasting Table list of museums every food lover should visit.