Built in 1924 by John F. Williams, owner of the Nehi Bottling Company in Opelika, Alabama, The Bottle was a wooden replica of a bright orange Nehi soda bottle billed as the world's largest bottle. It stood 64 feet tall, measured 49 feet in diameter at the base and 16 feet at the cap, and housed a grocery store and service station on the ground floor, with living quarters and storage on the second and third floors. Windows in the neck served an observation tower, the bottle cap formed the roof, and a spiral oak stairway rose inside. It became a gathering place for tourists and local residents, who swapped yarns and held parties every Friday night on the balcony above the service station. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stopped there briefly after visiting Auburn. The structure burned one morning in the fall of 1936, but the name endures on Alabama maps, which still identify the area as The Bottle.