For some 90 years, the heavenly aroma of freshly baked bread has wafted from 17th Street at Franklin Avenue. And for the past five decades, the firm responsible for that appetizing air was Mrs Baird’s Bakery, which purchased the plant in 1960.

Earlier this year, officials with Mrs Baird’s announced that this month, the plant will cease production. Company spokesmen have said Mrs Baird’s will keep the building — a 43,000-square-foot facility built in 1919 for Jones Fine Bread Company — and continue local shipping and delivery operations, however.

“It’s the end of an era,” said Wilton Lanning, a lifelong Waco resident, local history buff and former “dough-twister” for the firm in the 1960s while he was a Baylor University student. “Whenever they were baking, the neighborhood smiled.”

Ninia Lilla Baird began her bakery in Fort Worth out of necessity in 1908 when the poor health of her husband, William Baird, prevented him from working on a regular basis. The couple, natives of Tennessee, came to Texas in 1901 to own and operate restaurants.

Ninia Baird already had a reputation among her neighbors as an excellent baker, so it did not take long for her to establish a money-making enterprise. She baked bread, four loaves at a time, in a wood-burning oven at home and delivered the bread to her customers on foot.

After William Baird’s death in 1911, Mrs Baird’s Bakery became more of a family affair. The four Baird sons — Dewey, Hoyt, Roland and C.B. — helped her bake and deliver the goods while her older daughters ran the household and cared for younger siblings.

By the time Ninia Baird retired from active kitchen duty in 1919, Mrs Baird’s Bakery had expanded greatly, with a big brick plant in Fort Worth and a fleet of delivery trucks. In 1998, the firm was sold to Grupo Industrial Bimbo of Mexico.

Lanning said he still remembers how the production line ran: The dough, mixed on the top floor of the building, was dropped down a hopper to a lower floor and then taken via a conveyor belt to the machinery that extruded the dough into foot-long pieces.

“Then you had to reach over and hand-twist two strips together. I did it so much, I could probably still do it in my sleep,” Lanning said.

The twisted bread was dropped into a proofing pan where it rested and rose a second time before it was sent into the oven, he added. “It came out the other end smelling wonderfully.”

tjryan@wacotrib.com

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