By Honor Neve

There is nothing quite like walking down Riverside Avenue early in the morning with the smell of cinnamon, sugar, and baking bread wafting down the street from the City Bakery.

Our dedicated baker is always hard at work cranking out her marvellous (and enormous) cinnamon buns. Over the course of a year, she will make over 8,500 cinnamon buns and, if you are lucky enough to arrive early, many times the buns are still warm from the oven. Although some long time staff claims to be sick of the cinnamon buns they remain an essential part of the Fort Steele experience.

According to traveler accounts in the Prospector newspaper, at Fort Steele’s peak there were three active bakeries in town. In August 1896, a mining man from Spokane, Washington “found Fort Steele to be a scene of great activity and one of remarkable promise.” He also reported that Fort Steele boasted “two general merchandise stores, three good hotels, a blacksmith shop, three bakeries, two barber shops, three livery stables, two laundry’s, Custom House, Provincial Headquarters, a new swing bridge, and several fine houses, the Prospector newspaper and the Indian Agency. The merchants seem to be doing well.”

Today there is little evidence of those three bakeries. Much of the evidence for the existence of the people and businesses of Fort Steele come from the Prospector newspaper. Both advertisements placed by the businesses and stories published about them help us to better understand what was here during Fort Steele’s hey day when so little physical evidence survives.

According to the Prospector, Henry Kershaw, a German by the name of Frank Peckstein, Mrs. Neidig, Henry Alie, and Mrs. Jessie Underhill/Dilse all ran bakeries between 1897 and 1899. Many of them advertised their homemade bread, cakes, pastries, fresh vegetables, milk, butter, and even watermelons.

The derelict building right next door to the modern City Building is all that remains of Mrs. Underhill’s original bakery which opened in the late 1800s. One of the building’s functions can be determined by the remains of the large wood-fired oven located at the back of the structure among the trees. The building also demonstrates the primary enemies, not only of Fort Steele but of similar towns constructed before the turn-of-the-century. These enemies are fire, weather, and a changing economy.

Today’s Fort Steele City Bakery was constructed to address the culinary needs of visitors and to interpret an almost lost art (or technology, depending on your bent) of baking in a wood oven. The large wood-fired brick oven is capable of baking 250 loafs of bread at a time. It is fired early every morning in order to deliver fresh baking by the time the first visitors enter the park. I find those aromas that waft from the large double doors onto Riverside Avenue are its most effective advertising.

#FortSteele #ExploreYesterdayToday #CinnamonBuns

– Honor Neve is Assistant Curator at Fort Steele Heritage Town

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