The Milan News-Leader
A Heritage Newspaper
Weekly Publication
Bakery a Milan landmark
Martha Churchill
PUBLISHED: February 21, 2008
If you go back far enough, it's possible to find a time when Milan didn't have a bakery at the end of East Main Street.
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Perhaps when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, Milan was without a bakery at that spot.
Actually, looking at Sanborn fire maps, I can see that there was no bakery at that location in 1895. The store on the end, 42 E. Main St., was not a bakery, but a millinery shop. That means they sold hats. Both men and women were crazy about hats at that time, and photos of people walking on the streets back then always show the hats being worn.
Next to the hat shop was a harness shop to keep horses under control. After that, there was a grocery store that sold bread, as well as other food items. Walking along the sidewalk toward the center of town in 1895, you would pass by the grocery store and notice the Gay Opera House and Masonic Temple on the left. After that, you would walk past a butcher shop, a barber and then a clothing store on the corner.
Some grocery stores at that time made more money delivering food and bread to the farmhouses rather than sitting in their shops waiting for customers to arrive. A desperate farm wife with an empty pantry would probably buy anything on the grocer's wagon and fix it for dinner.
As time went on, the idea of a bakery caught on as a business separate from a grocery store. Someone with the name of "Casie" had a bakery at 29 E. Main St. as early as 1906, according to one of the late Warren Hale's "Way Back When" columns. That would be a Chinese restaurant today.
The business was so successful that it attracted an investor, Norman Eighme (pronounced "Amy") of Detroit. Eighme bought Casie's bakery in 1919 and increased production so that five trucks were hauling baked goods to the customers or perhaps to grocery stores.
Bread didn't catch on immediately when it was introduced. People living in the rural areas were accustomed to baking their own bread once a week, often on wood stoves or coal-fired ovens, and store-bought bread just didn't seem right. Gradually, the farming community overcame its reluctance, probably in the summer when the family didn't have to tend the hot ovens every week in July and August.
One of the first employees Eighme hired was Harold Spears, a Milan resident who got into the baking business by taking a job with Eighme. Spears worked at the Milan bakery 15 years until he opened a bakery in Ypsilanti.
By 1927, or perhaps before that, Eighme needed more space for his highly successful bakery. He gobbled up two storefronts on East Main Street, almost across the street from his first storefront. He chose the millinery shop and the shop next door to it at 42 and 38 E. Main St. This gave him most of the "Palmer Block" in downtown Milan.
Eighme placed his display cases in Shop 38, which is a copy and print shop today. The big baking equipment and huge stores of flour and sugar were next door in the manufacturing part — what we think of today as "the bakery."
The equipment in Eighme's bakery was amazing. He had scales that were automated, so they would dump the right amount of flour into the batch. He wanted to create no more than 292 loaves of bread at a time because that was all his oven would hold.
As time went on, Eighme remodeled his two shops, removing the stairs sometime before 1940. Each shop had an inside set of stairs, allowing a shop owner to live upstairs, and make a living on the main floor. That must be the shortest commute possible between work and home. Eighme didn't like it because the stairs took up valuable floor space on the main floor, and the people upstairs generally worked someplace else.
In about 1940, Frank Carver showed up in Milan after working for a bakery in Leslie. He was about 30 years old, and he had his wife and three children, the youngest just learning to walk. The family moved into an apartment in the upstairs of a house on Wabash, where the road bends.
Carver spent several months laboring in Dundee at Henry Ford's plant, which is now a Mill museum. Factory work didn't suit Carver. He quit his job and went to work for Eighme at the bakery in Milan.
Baking pies, cookies and even elephant ears, Carver knew he wanted to be a baker. Eighme steped down from his bakery dynasty after almost 30 years, selling his business to Carver in 1948.
I am not sure exactly when today's picture was taken, but you can see the Secretary of State office next door, behind the parking meters. This was a color picture, showing off the deep red door in the front, and a bright pink neon sign in the window. I am guessing the picture was taken in the 1970s.
Although Carver sold every kind of bread, rolls, cookies, doughnuts and brownies, his family knew the truth about him. His favorite treat in the bakery was fried cake.
Starting in 1967, Carver had a family member working alongside him, son-in-law, Nelson Lamson. That arrangement worked out well until Carver retired in about 1985. Lamson took over the bakery until his retirement in 1996, when Charlotte Thompson took over.
The bakery is still producing yummy treats. It has been continuously operated in that same location since the mid-1920s. That's 80 years of bread, doughnuts, coffee cakes, wedding cakes and goodies. How sweet it is.
Thanks to Jo Anne Betz and Donna Carver for the photos and information.
Martha Churchill is a member of the Monroe County Genealogical Society. She can be reached at 439-4055 or MilanHistory@yahoo.com.
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