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Southern companies that sparked a revolution in logistics

Bart Elmore got his PhD at UVA, but he grew up in Atlanta – surrounded by corporate giants like CNN, Delta, Coca Cola and the world’s busies airport, but when he went to college in New England, classmates looked down on the place. Today, he’s a historian and author who profiles five ground-breaking companies with roots in the South, beginning with FedEx, founded by Fred Smith.

Author and historian Bart Elmore writes about Southern companies that served small rural communities and built innovative business models.
Jonathan Zadra
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Bart Elmore
Author and historian Bart Elmore writes about Southern companies that served small rural communities and built innovative business models.

“He modeled his business on Delta Airlines, which incidentally started as a crop-dusting company that started in the Mississippi Delta," he says. "That’s why it’s called Delta Airlines.”

Delta would fly people from all over the country – even smaller cities – to Atlanta and other hubs, then route them on to their final destination. Smith did the same thing for small packages and he did it overnight from Memphis.

“Smith wanted to be far enough South from all that snow, but he also wanted to be far enough north from the Gulf Coast where you would see storms and hurricanes that could disrupt travel,” Elmore explains.

He also writes about Coca Cola which built a network of bottlers and distributors that sparked road building and truck sales around the world.

“Having this availability of cold Coke for immediate consumption – that became kind of the mantra for Coca Cola. Not that you could pick up the Coke and bring it home but that you could drink it anywhere, any time.”

He says Coke, Walmart, Bank of America, Delta and Fedex were southern companies that broke the mold, but in so doing created big environmental problems that he hopes they’ll find ways to solve. The book is Country Capitalism by Bart Elmore. He'll speak Thursday night at 6 in Richmond's Fountain Bookstore. To register go to: Country Capitalism with Bart Elmore - In Store! Tickets, Thu, May 25, 2023 at 6:00 PM | Eventbrite

And he'll appear at Charlottesville's New Dominion Bookstore at 7 p.m. Friday evening on the downtown mall. Both events are free.

Sandy Hausman is Radio IQ's Charlottesville Bureau Chief