The bread record: wrapped bread, German bakers, and the smell over downtown

1859 — present

The staff of life, industrialized here: The baking firm is the Business section's; the food record begins with a Fort Wayne first. John B. Franke established the Wayne Biscuit Company at 350 Pearl Street in 1901, making Perfection Wafers and then bread, cakes and cookies. In 1923 the company — by then the Perfection Biscuit Company — became, on the History Center's account, the first bakery in Indiana to offer wrapped bread: the moment bread in Fort Wayne stopped being handed over a counter unwrapped and became a sealed, branded loaf. Perfection joined Quality Bakers of America in 1944 and began baking Sunbeam Bread in the mid-1940s; in 1957 the animated Sunbeam sign went up over Pearl Street, its slices pouring from the loaf every twenty seconds — over 800 million slices by the company's own count — and the smell of the bake over downtown became part of the city's sensory record for three generations. The plant baked some 200,000 loaves a day at the count the Post & Mail reported. The firm created the Aunt Millie's brand in 1991 and renamed itself Aunt Millie's Bakeries in 2005; in 2017 it announced the Pearl Street bakery's closing and a headquarters move to Waynedale, with the sign to stay.

Before the factories there were the German bakers. Griswold's 1917 biographical volume gives William F. Geller — born in Fort Wayne in 1859 to German parents, apprenticed at eighteen in Christian Hoftner's Fort Wayne bakery, proprietor by his majority of the bakery at Broadway and Washington that the volume calls the leading one of its kind in the city, with "a wide variety of fancy cakes and other fine table delicacies" — and president of the Indiana Master Bakers' Association in 1916–17. The 1911 telephone directory's classified list carries the trade in a line: the Myron Downing Bakery ("Domestic Bread, Good Every Day"), Emrich Baking, Haffner Star Bakery, Geller. And the neighborhood layer survives at Waynedale Bakery, founded in 1955 by Kyle Mason, a military baker; the Waynedale News in 2016 called it, at sixty-one years, the bakery with the most longevity in Fort Wayne, known for doughnuts, six-inch "Best Wishes" cakes, paczkis for Fat Tuesday and Friday challah.

Sources:

1. The History Center, collection record for the Perfection Brand shipping crate (c. 1920s) — the 1901 founding, the 1923 wrapped-bread first, Sunbeam from 1946, the 1957 sign, the 2005 renaming.
2. ACGSI Allen INGenWeb, Aunt Millie's page — the Pearl Street address, the Quality Bakers of America membership of 1944, the sign's slice count, the 2017 closing announcement and Waynedale headquarters move.
3. Griswold & Taylor, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Vol. II (1917), the William F. Geller sketch — the Hoftner apprenticeship, the Broadway and Washington bakery, the Master Bakers presidencies.
4. Fort Wayne telephone directory, 1911, classified list — the bakers of the directory year.
5. Waynedale News, "Nothing Says Loving Like Something from the Oven" (20 May 2016) — Waynedale Bakery's 1955 founding, its ownership line, the longevity statement and the specialty record.
6. Businesses — the baking firm as a company, cross-referenced and not retold here.