Move aside New Orleans. Barq’s root beer belongs to Biloxi.

History revisionists hit a topic near and dear to the po-boy eating, shrimp-peeling populous of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Move aside New Orleans. Barq’s root beer belongs to Biloxi.

It’s unique, biting flavor spread across Bay St. Louis to Pascagoula in the early years, not across St. Charles to Bourbon. That Crescent City pop connection wouldn’t come for three decades. Yet, the majority of loyalists who bother to know anything about the drink believe Barq’s root beer is New Orleans-born and bred.

Claims abound that Barq’s is as original to the Crescent City as Mardi Gras and beignets. In an apparent concession, the Coca-Cola Co., which bought the right to brew Barq’s nationwide in 1995, now says on it history site, “Born in New Orleans. Bred in Biloxi.”

Huh? The drink was created either in Biloxi or New Orleans.

You can’t have it both ways just because the New Orleans moniker makes a better national selling point.

True, Edward Charles Barq, Sr., was born in New Orleans but the genius pop inventor first produced his popular root beer — simply called “Barq’s” or “Barq’s Pop” in the early years — in Biloxi.

That’s where most of the research arrows point. To add to the debate, you can still buy Barq’s in its iconic glass bottle in both South Mississippi and South Louisiana, but the rest of the nation must settle for cans or soda fountains.

The Barq’s story isn’t just about root beer. There’s also a branded crème soda, and then there’s 130 years of company history. According to newspaper advertisements, Barq first bottled mineral waters and experimented with the chemistry of pop flavorings he’d studied at a French university as well as sugar chemistry classes at Tulane University.

About 1890, he opened Barq’s Brothers Bottling in New Orleans with his older brother Gaston. Ed was just 19, if the most stated year for Barq’s Bros. is accurate.

Gaston soon died tragically, and New Orleans in those days had many competing bottling companies. Running a big-city business would be no easy task for such a young man.

Family histories are murky as to when the two had returned from France with their mother and when they actually formed Barq’s Bros. Even the year Ed got a World’s Fair gold medal for his Orangine pop is conflicting. Take your choice, 1893 or 1903.

This is a story told with question marks, but that makes Barq’s no less thirst-quenching for its tangy, sweet but not-cloyingly so, herby, fizzy, tongue biting, caffeine-tinged elixir that creates legions of fans. When Barq died in 1943 at 71, his brand was being bottled at 150 plants in more than 30 states.

Under management of Barqs heirs, the root beer’s popularity seesawed until it was once again a regional drink. Two New Orleans die-hard fans bought Barq’s in 1976, and of course that revived the New Orleans spin. Then Coca-Cola bought out the two N.O. entrepreneurs in 1995.

The reason so many from Louisiana think it their drink is because of a man named Jessie Robinson who was obviously special to Ed Barq. He allowed Robinson to make the secret syrup, bottle and promote Barq’s, and Robinson was good at it. Regional popularity skyrocketed. The Barq’s diamond-cut glass bottle was already familiar to Orleanians because it was the same as their Jax beer bottle.

But to all other bottlers across the nation, the syrup recipe remained a family secret, and Ed Barq remained an enigma they admired for understanding the soft drink market.

Ed Barq was born in 1871 to J. Auguste Barq, a native of Rouen in Normandy, France. Auguste was a “claims agent” who helped Southerns reclaim possessions taken by the government during Reconstruction.

When Ed was only 2, Auguste died unexpectedly at age 43, leaving the widow Marie Georgine Barq with little choice but to use her piano skills to go to France to teach wealthy American families living there. Little has been written about the Barqs family in France, but the most common story is that Ed returned to New Orleans from Paris and Bourdeaux when he was 23.

Again, putting the story together is dicey because of conflicting dates and histories. But for sure, Ed Barq moved to Biloxi in 1899, although some accounts claim earlier. This comes from the April 9, 1899, Biloxi Herald:

“Edward Barq has bought the soda manufactory from Martin Loescher and is establishing the business on Lameuse Street, opposite Hotel d’Montross. He will be ready for business by Monday next and will also supply the Coast. The present management has been in same business in France, New Orleans and St. Peter, La.”

At the opening of his Biloxi business, Ed was 28 and married less than a year to New Orleans native Elodie Graugnard, eight years his junior.

Little is known of Loescher, but six months earlier he lost his two-month-old baby and soon would leave the Coast. He was described in the newspaper as “the well known manufacturer of high-grade mineral water [who would] reopen his factory about the first of May and solicits a share of public patronage.”

But it was soon in the hands of Barq, who named his business The Biloxi Artesian Bottling Works, and later Barq’s Beverages. Obviously a forward thinker, in 1902 he established a branch in Gulfport. His Biloxi business soon located on Keller Avenue, where he first manufactured “celery and iron and high grade pop.”

Soon, “Biloxi Pop” was one of the most commonly advertised, and many think that was his root beer, which he was openly reluctant to call root beer. “Barq’s is Barq’s,” he’d say. The word “root beer” didn’t appear in local ads until 1932 when he was attracting a national crowd that needed the flavor identity.

When Barq first moved to Biloxi, he jumped into his adopted hometown feet-first as a volunteer fireman, city alderman, yachtsman, and business leader. A hint of his work ethic and personality is in this 1906 classified ad: “Active Boys To Wash Bottles; none but hustlers need apply.”

Next Week: Chill a bottle of Barq’s and prepare for more Barq’s tales: House burnings, runaway horses and a family secret.

Kat Bergeron, a veteran feature writer specializing in Gulf Coast history and sense of place, is retired from the Sun Herald. She writes the Mississippi Coast Chronicles column as a freelance correspondent. Reach her at BergeronKat@gmail.com or at Southern Possum Tales, P.O. Box 33, Barboursville, VA 22923.