Spaulding Bakeries

To accompany my earlier posts about bread nostalgia (here and here), I have to mention another bread maker from the mid-20th century: Spaulding Bakeries. I recently found a copy of the company's 50th anniversary booklet from 1946:


This was their coverage area at the time:


I always thought of Spaulding's as an upstate New York thing, but clearly it extended into much of Pennsylvania and a bit of several other states.

The booklet contains drawings of its bakery plants in New York and Pennsylvania, like these two in Elmira and Oneonta:


And it also tells the company's origin story, which, as with some of the other bakeries, involved a woman:

Fifty years ago, Spaulding’s bread was launched from a one-oven home-made plant with a neighborhood sale of six loaves… today, with 850 workers in seven plants, Spaulding’s is recognized as a pioneer and leader in many branches of bread-making….

The Spaulding success story had its beginning when the grocer boy, stopping at the Spaulding home in Binghamton’s South Side, was prompted by the aroma of Mrs. Spaulding’s freshly baked bread to exclaim: “If I could get bread like that I could sure sell it!”

A nearby grocer soon took Mrs. Spaulding’s entire daily output of six loaves and from then on she worked with her husband to bake more bread. They got an oven that baked 24 loaves at once. They made pies and cookies. They got an oven that turned out 108 loaves at once. And 50 years later, their work was marked by this anniversary booklet.

For all that, Mrs. Spaulding got a picture in the booklet but no first name.

Aside from their bread, my favorite Spaulding item was their krullers, which came in a bright orange box, striped with white (but shown here in brown ink from the booklet):


Plain or coated with powdered sugar, I could never decide which kind I liked best.