A stubborn fire last month in a 100-year-old West Baltimore structure halted Amtrak and MARC trains and caused families along Bentalou Street to be evacuated. News reports described the source of the prolonged burning as mattresses that had been stored in a brick warehouse.
To describe 2140 Edmondson Ave. as a mattress warehouse is accurate, but the building had an earlier life and served a different purpose. It opened in 1925 as the Ward Baking Company and was once one of the ruling commercial bakeries in the city.
The company was not alone as a bread baker — Greater Rosemont and Sandtown-Winchester were once the commercial bread basket of Baltimore.
Ward Baking was a firm founded in New York City by two Irish-born brothers, James and Hugh Ward. They may have had a single oven when they started, but the firm was a resounding success and eventually there were Ward baking plants in Pittsburgh, then Brooklyn, New York, and Providence, Rhode Island.
By 1923, its flagship product, Bond Bread, was described as “the best-selling bread in the United States.” A company history says that Ward “pioneered the use of technology to mass-produce bread, reducing the need for hand-kneading and shaping.”
Baltimore was in the company’s sights as a place to locate another bread factory after World War I.
Ward executives brought in their architect, Corrie Comstock, who specialized in industrial plants, to design what became their big bakery on Edmondson Avenue.
Residents in the Greater Rosemont neighborhood were not happy with the plant, but nevertheless, it opened and flourished until the mid-80s.
Known as the Ward plant, its corporate name was Continental Baking Co. and through mergers and acquisitions, it wound up with several patented names for its bread. There was Ward’s Tip Top Bread and the somewhat better-known Wonder Bread.
But the Edmondson Avenue plant had another product line, the Hostess Twinkie, the snack cake that was invented in Illinois in 1930.
Hostess Twinkies were a staple of Baltimore convenience stores for decades and competed heavily against the Philadelphia-baked TastyKake. Baltimore’s own favorite sweet, the Berger cookie, was by comparison a very different confection. For decades, Berger cookies were baked and chocolate-smothered in a (by comparison) almost artisanal kitchen-bakery in East Baltimore on Aiken Street and sold mainly at city market stalls.
Baltimore cannot claim that Hostess Twinkies are a local product. Research into this treat seems to indicate that while they were not baked on Edmondson Avenue, they were delivered in quantity there and distributed throughout Maryland from that location.
The Ward-Continental-Twinkie baking dynamo had plenty of local competition only blocks away.
There were numerous food-related factories located along the Amtrak train tracks. Freight trains delivered raw materials and the industrial zoning along the rail tracks created an industry-friendly setting. (Don’t forget Mrs. Filbert’s margarine plant along the tracks a little ways south.)
Close by, at West Lafayette Avenue, was the Acme Markets warehouse, which also included its regional bakery.
Schmidt’s Bakery, in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood, lasted the longest of the clutch of West Baltimore industrial bake houses. Its big plant, at Carey and Laurens Street, was about a mile from the Ward plant.
The third mighty competitor was the Hauswald Bakery at Edmondson Avenue and Franklintown Road. On a warm summer night, the presence of two huge bakeries seven blocks apart on Edmondson Avenue must have made for some sweet aromas.
Hauswald’s sold out to Schmidt’s in 1989 and production continued for a while longer.
Another Edmondson Avenue mainstay of bread consumption was the old Harley’s sandwich shop that had an outpost near both the Ward (Continental) and Hauswald Bakery. The Harley shop (one of many in the region) was in the old Edmondson Avenue Pennsylvania Railroad Station.
Harley’s was a busy sandwich destination and consumed mountains of submarine sandwich rolls in its heyday, the same period when the Schmidt’s, Ward and Hauswald ovens were keeping Baltimore well-fueled with product for toast and sandwiches.
But Harley’s and its owner, Harley T. Brinsfield, used another bakery, the one that survived them all and remains in business today. As he told his listeners on his nightly jazz radio program, Harley Brinsfield’s breads came from the H&S Bakery in East Baltimore.
Have a news tip? Contact Jacques Kelly at jacques.kelly@baltsun.com and 410-332-6570.