This episode contains graphic depictions of violence.

Listener discretion is advised.

Month number one.

It's the night of January 21, 1911, and we're in Atlanta, Georgia, an up-and-coming railroad town with a population of about 150,000.

Here is what we know about that Saturday night.

It was cloudy, cold but not freezing, and it was likely storming.

We know that because one of the local Atlanta newspapers called for unsettled weather earlier that day.

From lunar records, we know the moon was waning that night, about half full.

This was a fairly dark night in Georgia's capital city.

By sundown, that unsettled weather had descended upon the streets of Inman Park, a newly built,

wealthy suburb just a few miles from downtown Atlanta.

Inman Park was the new it neighborhood and had been attracting some of the most prestigious

white families in the city.

This was the neighborhood of governors, prestigious white families in the city. This was the neighborhood

of governors, university presidents, and newspaper editors. And it was also home to one of the

most recognizable names in Atlanta social circles, the Canlars. In the 1880s, the patriarch of the

Canler family, Asa, bought the recipe of a popular new drink that

featured a small amount of cocaine as a prominent ingredient. Canler got the recipe for a steel,

around $2,000 from its creator, a desperate chemist who unsurprisingly was dying of a cocaine addiction.

That drink, of course, was Coca-Cola.

By the early 1900s, Inman Park was filled with Candlers,

and therefore filled with Coca-Cola money.

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