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WASHINGTON - Few carbonated drinks have quite such a sense of their own history as Dr Pepper's, first concocted by a German pharmacist in Texas in 1865.
But an ill-judged decision by the drink's British manufacturers threatened other important pieces of United States history.
The problems started for Cadbury Schweppes, which is based in England, when it launched a treasure hunt across 23 US cities, promising £760,000 ($2.1 million) to anyone who found one of its hidden gold coins.
The agency it hired to bury a coin in Boston, Massachusetts, chose the 347-year-old Granary Burying Ground - final resting place of some of the founding fathers of American independence, including John Hancock, Paul Revere and Samuel Adams.
The first the city's parks department knew of its part in the hunt was when contestants guided there by 30 clues started complaining last Wednesday that the graveyard was closed because of icy paths.
Anxious officials closed the park indefinitely and tried to avert a stampede by finding the coin themselves.
But it eventually took an official of the marketing firm that had placed it there to locate it behind a stone slab covering the entrance to a 200-year-old crypt.
An irate Boston Parks Commissioner, Toni Pollak, described the action as absolutely disrespectful. "It's an affront to the people who are buried there, our nation's ancestors."
- INDEPENDENT
