Vernors, a caramel-coloured Detroit ginger ale that a pharmacist began pouring at his drug store counter in 1866, is the soda March 13 was chosen for.
“Raskin proposed a date and an act. She named no holiday. Other people did that within a day.
Food writer Hanna Raskin proposed the day in the Dallas Observer on March 2, 2011, asking readers to drink a Vernors on March 13 because 3/13 is Detroit's telephone area code. Her column never proposed a holiday name; the Michigan blog Michigan Expats supplied one the next day, in a post that opened by thanking a reader for forwarding Raskin's article.
National Ginger Ale Day sits on a date that has nothing to do with ginger ale. March 13 is 3/13. Area code 313 has served Detroit and the rest of Wayne County since 1947.
That is the whole of the date's logic. In 2011 a food writer proposed that Americans mark the number by drinking a Vernors, the ginger ale Detroit has been sipping since the Civil War era. The column never proposed a holiday name at all.
It acquired one within a day, and drifted from there. By 2021 a Connecticut company was giving away 2,000 cans for the day, in a press release that mentions neither Detroit nor Vernors.
DEALS & OFFERS
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Ginger ale came out of a chemist's shop. Grattan and Co of Belfast sold medicines and made soft drinks alongside them, and its principal assistant was a Dublin-born qualified medical practitioner, Thomas Joseph Cantrell. Historians widely credit him with inventing the drink, and the firm he later built embossed "The Original Makers of Ginger Ale" on its bottles.
The pale dry style came later, a deliberate remake of Cantrell's. John James McLaughlin, a Toronto pharmacist, bottled the sweet, dark gold Belfast style and then changed it to a less sugared substance of lighter colour. He filed for the Canada Dry Pale Dry Gingerale trademark in November 1905.
James Vernor went the other way. He enlisted in the 4th Michigan Cavalry in 1862, and in 1866 opened a drug store at Woodward Avenue and Clifford Street, selling his ginger ale at the counter.
For several years that counter was the only place anyone could buy it. As demand grew he made other soda fountains install special equipment first, and sold them the water to mix it with.
The day arrived much later, and from outside Michigan. Hanna Raskin's Dallas Observer column of 2 March 2011 was about Cheerwine going mail-order, until Vernors partisans wrote in to defend their own soda.
She ended the piece with a proposal instead of a conclusion: drink a Vernors on March 13, a date she glossed as Detroit's area code, "as all you Eminem fans know". Her reason was not the soda. It was to "take one pop break to honor a city that deserves better than a RoboCop statue and the shuttering of 70 more schools".
Michigan Expats picked it up the next day, posting under the heading "Inaugural National Vernors Day, 3/13" and thanking a reader for forwarding Raskin's article. There was already a Facebook event and a Tumblr.
On 11 March the Michigan travel writer Kath Usitalo wrote it up, noting that Vernors "inspired the inaugural National Vernors Day on Sunday, March 13".
Usitalo has kept updating the piece since. Its current version reports that the effort to make March 13 National Vernors Day "seems to have fizzled out". The date outlived the campaign that named it.
TIMELINE
GOOD TO KNOW
He was an original member of the Michigan Board of Pharmacy when it formed in 1887, and held License No. 1 throughout his career.
Maude McLaughlin often suggested improvements to her husband's recipes, and supplied the line that made the brand famous: "The Champagne of Ginger Ales."
Sometime at the end of the 1950s Vernor's quietly became Vernors, and the shorter spelling is the one on the can today.
The soda was bottled in Detroit for more than 100 years before local production ended, leaving the city with the name and not the plant.
The Detroit Historical Museum set its anniversary party for 11 June 2016, with 14 downtown restaurants running Vernors specials and two Vernor descendants due to appear.
MYTH VS FACT
The Boston Cooler is named after Boston, or after Detroit's Boston Boulevard.
Neither. The Detroit Historical Society records that the float took its name from the generic early twentieth century term for any drink mixing ice cream and soda. The Vernor's Company copyrighted the name in 1967, for a flavoured ice cream bar.
Vernors was discovered by accident, when a soldier came home to a barrel that had aged four years while he was at war.
That is company legend, and it is not the only account. The Detroit Historical Society sets the popular story alongside another claim, backed by a family member, that Vernor did not create the formula until after the Civil War.
Vernors is America's oldest soft drink.
The institution that holds the collection does not go that far. The Detroit Historical Society calls it one of the nation's oldest soft drinks, first served to the public in 1866, and stops short of ranking it first.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Detroit's own March 13 is nine years older than the drink's.
Detroit was working on its own claim to the date: a resolution drafted for the City Council in February 2023 would name March 13 as 313 Day, a day for the city's history and culture. The civic day it describes began nine years before the column that proposed the soda date.
Vernor built his tonic from vanilla and spices, with ginger added to calm the stomach. The Detroit Historical Society records that it is still drunk to settle a stomachache, or mixed with lemon juice and served hot for a sore throat.
Michigan House Bill 4744, introduced on 22 July 2025, runs to a single operative line: "Vernors is the official beverage of this state." It was read a first time and sent to the Committee on Government Operations the same day, and the bill's official history records nothing since.
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No. It is an unofficial observance with no federal record behind it, so banks, schools and offices stay open on March 13.
COLOPHON
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