Sam Jessup

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Sam Jessup (D)
Sam Jessup.JPG
Jessup

Electoral District At-large
Term Start September 1, 1932
Term End August 31, 1936
Preceded by Fred L. Watson (D)
Succeeded by Sam Jessup (D)

Electoral District At-large
Term Start September 1, 1936
Term End August 31, 1939
Preceded by Sam Jessup (D)
Succeeded by Charles P. Nash (D)

Biographical Information

Date of birth June 9, 1877
Date of death July 20, 1960
Place of death Charlottesville, VA
Residence City of Charlottesville
Profession Business

Samuel Ambrose Jessup (“Mr S.A.” as he became known by friends and colleagues; 1877-1960) was a businessman and served eight years on the Charlottesville City Council (1936 to 1939).[1]

Founder of the Charlottesville Pepsi Cola Bottling Co. and the Monticello Dairy. At times, Jessup and his children ran various businesses - a dairy and ice cream plant, a bus company, an insurance business, a laundry, a beer franchise and a cigar company.

Business interests

  • Charlottesville Pepsi Cola Bottling Co. In 1908, Jessup obtained a license to bottle the 10-year-old soda product. Its many related products remains the principle family business with annual sales of 8.5 million cases a year and 362 current employees.
Pepsi-Cola was originally created and developed in 1893 by Caleb Bradham, a young pharmacist in New Bern, North Carolina, who owned a drug store with a soda fountain.
  • Monticello Dairy: Established in 1912 in a small room in Jessup’s bottling works on Fourth Street between Main and Water streets and later moved to Grady Avenue with more than 300 employees and a delivery fleet of 124 trucks and trailers.
  • Virginia Stage Lines, later Virginia Trailways, purchased in 1926, grow into a 385-employee business with routes across most of Virginia and into North Carolina and Washington, D.C.
  • City Laundry
  • Anheuser-Busch beer franchise (sold to the Sieg family in the 1960s).

Riverview Cemetery

In 1936 Samuel Jessup, purchased a majority of Riverview stock, and became president of the company. His son Claude Jessup took over ownership following his death and ran the company until 1986. As of 2019, Riverview Cemetery is still privately owned.

Public life

Jessup won election to the city council, along with George T. Huff and Shelton S. Fife, in the 1932 election and took office on September 1, 1932. He was re-elected in the 1936 election. Jessup's last day on the city council was August 31, 1939 at the close of the fiscal year.

Early life, family, death

Jessup’s father died when he was 5. He became an entrepreneur as a teenager, buying a small tobacco farm and starting a general store and a post office before moving from Patrick County to Martinsville in 1904 and then to Charlottesville four years later. Jessup was the father of five children. Internment in the family plot at Riverview Cemetery.


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References

  1. Web. Sam Jessup:Beyond the success of his Pepsi bottling business, he served on City Council for eight years, Bob Gibson, Daily Progress Digitized Microfilm, Lindsay family, May 3, 2017, retrieved July 20, 2019. Print. May 3, 2017 page 1.

External Links