The history of breadmaking parallels the history of human development. Although individuals have made bread since the Stone Age, grinding cereals and grains into a paste and exposing them to heat — the earliest flatbreads — that process is labor intensive. The availability of grain and establishment of flour mills combined with population growth gave rise to the nation's baking industry, which came to Spokane in the late 1800s to early 1900s.
In 1910, Spokane saw its population more than double to around 100,000, spurred in part by European immigrants who would play a significant role in Spokane's bread baking history. And with grain from the nearby Palouse, a robust rail system and the river to generate power, it's no wonder that breadmaking thrived in turn-of-the-century Spokane.
Before it was the Wonder Building — the three-story red-brick structure facing West Broadway Avenue between Lincoln and Post streets— the Spokane-Continental Bakery Building housed Sengfelder Bakery & Confectionery Co., which dates to 1887. Like many bakeries then and now, it was bought, sold and renamed — it was Spokane Bakery Company for a time — several times over. In 1925, Continental Baking Company bought the place and began making the first fortified bread from its newly acquired Wonder brand. Interstate Bakeries Corp. bought the building in 1995, shutting down the ovens in 2000.
In 1889, Olaf Jacobsen opened his namesake bakery on North Ash Street, a space now occupied by My Fresh Basket. It changed hands several times, finally acquired by Boge's Bakery, which was itself swallowed up by Oregon-based Franz Bakery in 1985.
In 1927, a major competitor to the Wonder brand opened with its Holsum brand: Silver Loaf Baking Company. With its tunnel ovens and mechanized production and packaging equipment, it was a beacon of modernism. It too exchanged hands over the years, ending up part of the Franz family by way of a Yakima-based bread maker, Snyder's Bakery.
Although many bakeries have come and gone in Spokane, in some ways Franz has outlasted them all. A prosperous West Coast-based chain dating to 1906, the company acquired numerous smaller bakeries, folding them under the Franz umbrella. It still operates Franz Bakery Outlet on North Fancher Road, distinguished by the rotating red, yellow and blue Franz "loaf" sign 60 feet high and easily seen from Interstate 90.
While larger mills and bakeries arose concurrent with cities, a commercial mill anywhere usually signaled big doings in an otherwise rural area. Not surprisingly, one of the first buildings erected in newly formed Palouse, Washington, was a flour mill in 1874. By the early 1900s, Palouse was looking like a bona fide town with several stores, restaurants and its very own bakery.
Commercial bakeries weren't the only places where bread was being baked en masse. Hotels and grocery stores recognized the need to scale up baking operations for their hungry customers. Nearly 90 years since J. Merton Rosauer acquired a small grocery store on the corner of Lee Street and Sprague Avenue, homegrown Rosauers Supermarkets is still making bread from scratch. ♦