The Banana Split
Latrobe, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
In 1904 in Latrobe, the first documented Banana Split was created by apprentice pharmacist David Strickler - sold here at the former Tassell Pharmacy. Bananas became widely available to Americans in the late 1800s. Strickler capitalized on this by cutting them lengthwise and serving with ice cream. He is also credited with designing a boat-shaped glass dish for his treat. Served worldwide, the banana split has become a prevalent American dessert.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
By the turn of the twentieth century, steamships and railroads had made the once-exotic banana a cheap, everyday fruit in American cities and towns. In 1904, a young apprentice pharmacist named David Strickler put that abundance to delicious use at the Tassell Pharmacy soda fountain here in Latrobe, splitting a banana lengthwise and dressing it with ice cream. He is even credited with designing the boat-shaped dish that still holds the treat today.
Why it matters
A small-town soda fountain gave the world one of America's most enduring desserts, a tasty reminder of how new trade routes and the golden age of the drugstore soda fountain reshaped everyday American life.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
At the turn of the twentieth century, America was falling in love with two new pleasures at once. The first was the banana: once a rare, exotic import, it became—thanks to steamships and railroads reaching deep into the country—cheap, plentiful, and suddenly ordinary in towns far from any port. By the late 1800s a fruit that had once seemed a novelty was piled on grocery counters everywhere.
The second was the drugstore soda fountain. The corner pharmacy of this era wasn't just a place for medicine; it was a social hub with a marble counter where an apprentice might dispense fizzy drinks and dishes of ice cream to a town's young people. It was one of the friendly, everyday theaters of Progressive-era American life.
Latrobe, in Westmoreland County, was exactly the kind of small Pennsylvania town where these two currents met—where cheap bananas and a busy soda fountain sat waiting for someone with a little imagination.
People & events
In 1904, that someone was David Strickler, a young apprentice pharmacist working the fountain at the Tassell Pharmacy, which stood here. Rather than serve a banana whole or slice it into a bowl, he cut it lengthwise, laid the two halves like the hull of a boat, and crowned it with ice cream.
The result was the first documented banana split. Strickler didn't stop at the recipe: he is also credited with designing the long, boat-shaped glass dish made to cradle the treat—an elegant solution that turned a clever idea into a signature presentation still recognized today.
It's worth savoring how modest the setting was. This was not a laboratory or a grand restaurant, but a small-town pharmacy counter, and the inventor was an apprentice, not a famous chef. That's part of the charm: a genuinely enduring American dessert came from someone simply making the most of what the new age had put within reach.
Its place in the American story
The banana split's journey from a Latrobe fountain to menus around the world is a small, sweet illustration of how modern America worked. New trade routes made an exotic fruit commonplace; a thriving soda-fountain culture gave a young person the stage to experiment; and a good idea, once loosed, traveled as fast as the country's booming networks could carry it.
The dessert became a fixture of American life—shorthand for indulgence, for shared celebrations, for the pleasures of the fountain era. Its very name conjures a whole vanished world of marble counters and paper straws.
That something so widely served and so instantly recognizable can be traced to one apprentice in one Pennsylvania town is exactly why it's worth a marker. It reminds us that everyday culture—the food we love without thinking about it—has origins, and sometimes those origins are gloriously specific.
If you visit
Latrobe wears this history with a wink, and it's a delightful stop on any road trip through western Pennsylvania. Stand where the Tassell Pharmacy once stood and picture the fountain: the hiss of soda water, the scoop dragged across ice cream, an apprentice trying something new.
The fun of this marker is how it recasts an ordinary treat. After you read it, the next banana split you order—anywhere in the world—will carry a little of this place with it. That boat-shaped dish is a design that started here.
Make a day of it: Latrobe is proud of its local claims to fame, and a banana split's birthplace pairs naturally with the small-town pleasures around it. Come hungry, and let a humble dessert remind you how much of American culture was invented at the corner drugstore.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · David Strickler
Themes & tags
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