The Baker in All of Us

by

Lauren Roberts

As sweet as chocolate is, the competition to supply chocolate and cocoa to the consumers of the nation is fraught with bitterness. That is certainly the story behind Baker’s Chocolate, a company that had its legendary start in 1764 when Dr. James Baker met up with an improvised Irishman named John Hannon. What they created was not the first chocolate mill of its kind on North American shores—apparently that was set up by Obadiah Brown in Providence, Rhode Island in 1752—but it was much more successful.

James Baker had fallen into the chocolate trade with that fortuitous meeting, having been beforehand a trainee minister, a teacher, a student of medicine, and a storeowner before he met Hannon who, though penniless, had something more valuable than money—the knowledge of how to make chocolate. The colonists already knew and loved it, but the cost of importing it from the West Indies was prohibitive for many. In addition, the form in which it came required grinding of the chocolate with mortar and pestle or an unwieldy and costly hand mill.

So when Baker discovered that Hannon knew how to make chocolate as well as set up and run a chocolate mill, went into partnership using his savings to fund the venture. Mills require power, at the time water power so they looked around until they found a sawmill that had been built alongside the Neponset River in eastern Massachusetts. By mid-1765, they were ready to test their process for grinding cocoa beans between two massive circular millstones. 

The top millstone was set to the same speed used to grind corn while Hannon poured the beans into a hole in the stone’s center. The running water caused the bottom stone to turn and the motion of both stone wheels pulverized the beans into a thick syrup. The syrup was then poured into a gigantic iron kettle and from there into molds that shaped it into hard cakes the shape and weight of bricks. Consumers would scrap the chocolate from the cakes and boil the scraps in water to make heavily sweetened cocoa.

Advertising via handbills in Dorchester, Boston and beyond increased demand to the point that it soon outstripped their ability to supply it. So in 1768 they moved their operation to larger quarters that Baker had rented from his brother-in-law, Edward Preston. With sales continuing to soar, Baker opened a second mill in 1772. It was around this time that he and Hannon suffered a quarrel or otherwise loosened their business ties. Hannon continued to operate the first plant, but Baker had learned what he needed to make his new plant turn out nearly nine hundred pounds of chocolate in 1773. It was a good thing too for two years later, the original plant burned to the ground, but Hannon, now financially secure, rented other quarters in a former tobacco mill and began production anew.

The American Revolution in 1775 hit both chocolatiers hard. Their dependence on imported cocoa beans forced them to turn to smuggling to get their raw product through the Royal Navy warships  hugging the coastline. Then a startling development occurred. Hannon disappeared. No one knows what happened, but several possibilities abound. Hannon had married in 1773, but the marriage was not a happy one. He may have determined to return to Ireland to escape his wife and used the story that he was going on a buying trip to the West Indies to explain his long absence or he may indeed have been on that trip. He simply vanished, and the likelihood is that he was either lost overboard or died onboard under an assumed name. Hannon’s widow determined to run her husband’s mill along with his capable apprentice, Nathaniel Blake. But Blake soon walked out—and right over to a new position with Baker who also soon bought out the old mill around 1780, the official date of he company’s founding. (My research about the beginning of this company turned up contradictory information from two supposedly reputable sources.) 

Sales were still increasing at an astonishing rate. Baker brought in his son, Edmund, to help run the business and they worked together from 1791 to 1804 when James retired. Edmund acquired a new site and built a new chocolate mill building alongside the Neponset as well as opening both a gristmill and a cloth mill nearby. He expanded sales from the eastern seaboard to the western outposts across America. But he also had to contend, as his father did before him, with a war that again interrupted his supplies. But The War of 1812 had an even more devastating effect: cocoa shipments were literally shut down by the Royal Navy’s ships and the kettles and molds in the Baker chocolate mill stood empty and unused for two years.

Fortunately, his other businesses kept finances stable and Edmund used that time to tear down the old mill and build a three-story granite one. As soon as the war ended, cocoa bean supplies resumed and the new mill was soon meeting demand. A couple of years later, in 1818, Edmund brought his son Walter into the business. One of Walter’s first moves was to expand the workforce and to include women in it.

Baker was on its way to becoming the standard name for chocolate and cocoa in America. One off-beat fact is that in 1833, Baker’s Cocoa was the only packaged and branded food product sold in the small general store in Old Salem, Illinois, that was co-owned by Abraham Lincoln. But in its hometown of Dorchester, it had competition from two other chocolate mills. The scent was so pervasive that locals soon begin calling the site of the three mills “Chocolate Village.” Not surprisingly, competition was ferocious; what became known as the Chocolate Wars was driven by a simple reason—profits. Prior to 1868, when refrigeration came about, the mills halted their production during the summer. But after that the Chocolate Wars turned into  a year-round battle.

Walter Baker never lived to see this. He died in 1852 leaving the business to his brother-in-law, Sidney B. Williams who had a longstanding interest in the business. Henry L. Pierce, another relative and an assistant to both men, assumed charge in 1854; he then leased the mill and arranged to continue the business under the name of Walter Baker & Company, Ltd. The company grew into a worldwide name while acquiring the chocolate house of Web and Twombly; its home base expanded to encompass more than forty acres on both sides of the river. 

Henry Pierce also did something unique—he came across what is probably one of the oldest of trademark pictures. It was while he was on a trip to Europe in 1881 that he saw the pastel of La Belle Chocolatiere (Chokolademadchen) by Swiss artist Jean Etienne Liotard in a gallery in Dresden, Germany. This portrait of Anna Baltauf, a chocolate serving girl in Vienna in the mid-eighteenth century, was commissioned by Austrian Prince Ditrichstien as a gift to his bride, the former serving girl.

Chocolate shops were all the rage at the time, and one cold afternoon in 1745, the prince dropped into one to discover for himself if this new chocolate drink was a wonderful as people claimed. His waitress that day was Anna, the daughter of an impoverished knight. He was so taken with her that despite objections from his family and those in the rigid upper-class social circles in which he moved, that he married her and made her a princess.  As a wedding gift, he asked the famous painter to paint her portrait. Wanting to honor their original meeting, Liotard posed the princess not in her regal costume but in her original server’s costume. It later was displayed at the Dresden Art Gallery, which is where Pierce saw it. He was captivated by the picture and considered it the ideal image for Baker’s products. It was formally adopted as their trademark in 1883. 

Shortly after the death of Pierce in 1896, Walter Baker & Co. became a publicly-held corporation headed by a man named H.C. Gallagher. It continued to expand, and then in 1927 was bought by General Foods Corporation who operated it from its original location until 1965 when the red brick  plant was shut down and operations moved to Dover, Delaware. Later, Kraft Food purchased Baker’s chocolate division.

During its independent reign, Baker’s remained very protective of its reputation and very aggressive with its advertising. In 1904, they appeared at the St. Louis World’s Fair dressed in their finery. The building in which they were housed a replica of the Walter Baker company home. Two stories high, of a Colonial style, its exhibition room housed large glass jars that showed the food through every step of its process from bean to finished products as well as working models of the chocolate machines that performed the process. Public lectures focusing on scientific cookery (with chocolate) were offered daily. Probably the most popular part was the serving room on the second floor where samples were handed out.

Because of its lofty perch, Baker’s was watched and sometimes imitated. One company was so bold that Walter Baker & Co. ended up taking it to court for using the Baker name for its chocolate and cocoa. From The Lawyer’s Reports Annotated (1911):

It is generally felt to constitute unfair competition for a dealer to substitute his own or another’s goods in place of those called for by the purchases where the substitution is made without the latter’s consent or knowledge. . . .

On this point . . . involving the right of a retail dealer to substitute for Walter Baker’s chocolate and cocoa, William Henry Baker’s chocolate and cocoa, where the purchaser asked for Baker’s chocolate and cocoa. Such substitution is held to be unfair competition although the cocoa of William Henry Baker was sold in the exact same form of package and style of label sanctioned by decrees of courts in proceedings by Walter H. Baker v. William Henry Baker to compel the latter to so distinguish his packages of cocoa and chocolate as to prevent their being mistaken for the former’s. The position taken by the court in this case is that Walter H. Baker, by persistent advertising and the aggressive pushing of his goods upon the market, has created a reputation therefore under the name of Baker and it is pointed out that his goods were not known by the name of Walter H. Baker’s chocolate and cocoa, but rather by the name of Baker’s chocolate and cocoa; and it is said that therefore, when the purchaser called for Baker’s chocolate or Baker’s cocoa, he obviously meant and intended to purchase Walter H. Baker’s, and it was the duty of the retailer to furnish this article, and he did not discharge his duty to the purchaser or to the complainant by informing him that ere were two different “Baker’s” products on the market, one manufactured by Walter Baker, the other by William H. Baker, and when the purchaser, as he usually did, expressed his ignorance as to which he wanted, but stated that he wanted the best, then furnishing him with the product of William H. Baker. The court said: “Without enlarging upon this conduct, we think it evinces a deliberate design and intention to deceive. The purchaser was entitled to that which he demanded, to that which had been approved to his taste by experience, or which he had been recommended to purchase. In the market there were no “two Baker’s” products. There was but one, and that was the product of Walter Baker & Company, Limited. . . .

The court returned all rights to the name “Baker’s Chocolate and Cocoa” to Walter Baker & Co. and the company continued to thrive. The bookmark is designed to promote the cocoa among what I would guess to be a (sophisticated) breakfast setting since they marketed that product specifically but not exclusively for that meal. The side of the pictured container contains the following recipe:

Baker’s Breakfast Cocoa
To make 4 cups of delicious Cocoa:

 

4 tablespoons Walter Baker’s Breakfast Cocoa

2 to 4 tablespoons sugar
Dash of salt
1 cup water
3 cups milk
Mix cocoa, sugar, salt and water in saucepan and place over direct heat. Stir until smooth; boil 2 minutes. Add milk and heat over slow fire. Do not boil. If desired, beat before serving. Serve at once. (All measurements are level.)

Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, nearly 1,300 bookmarks and approximately 1,200 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She is a member of the National Books Critics Circle (NBCC) as well as a longtime book design judge for Publishers Marketing Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. Contact Lauren.