John Pemberton Fulton County enacted temperance legislation, Pemberton had to produce a non-alcoholic alternative to his French Wine Coca. Pemberton relied on Atlanta drugstore owner-proprietor Willis E. Venable to test, and help him perfect, the recipe for the beverage, which he formulated by trial and error. With Venable's assistance, Pemberton worked out a set of directions for its preparation. He blended the base syrup with carbonated water by accident when trying to make another glassful of the beverage. Pemberton decided then to sell this as a fountain drink rather than a medicine. Frank Mason Robinson came up with the name "Coca-Cola" for
Pemberton, British Columbia renamed Squamish) but in 1912 the company ran out of funding. The Pacific Great Eastern Railway Company soon picked up the pieces and by 1912 advertisements suggested that one crop might pay for the "ideal little farms" created by the subdivision of the former John Currie property at Agerton. Readers were assured that "the day the railway arrives land will sell for $500 to $1000 per acre". The first train from Squamish reached Pemberton on Oct 29th, 1914. The Pemberton Station platform was a structure of "rough planks on a sea of roots" but the general roughness was of little