Food is more than food. As a historic restoration project involving an old brick bakery in Barre shows, food can also be history. The bakery was built by Barre’s Italians in 1913, to provide wholesome bread for the community that centered on the imposing red brick building on Granite Street now known as Old Labor Hall. Back then the main building’s name was the Socialist Labor Party Hall, and it served as a community center, where Italian families could meet for education, political organizing, entertainment and other activities. The bakery was built just behind it.
Because of their history, both buildings are on the National Register of Historic places. They're a link to Barre’s radical past and to some of Vermont’s most interesting history.
Although the reigning stereotype pictures Vermont at the turn of the 20th Century as a placid, farmed countryside, the reality, at least in Barre, was considerably different. The skilled Italian stonecutters who came to work Barre granite brought with them from Italy a brand of seething, idealistic reform politics that transformed the city.
Barre became a national center of Socialist and anarchist thought and activity. Among the major figures of the early 1900s who spoke there were Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, Big Bill Hayward, Mother Jones, Samuel Gompers, and Emma Goldman.
And at the center of it all was Old Labor Hall, and its wood-fired bakery. At its height, the Union Cooperative Bakery, as it was known, turned out 130 loaves of bread a day, which was sold at the Labor Hall and delivered by horse and cart to local customers.
But after the depression, the bakery closed, and the building fell into disrepair. That was too bad, thought Carolyn Shapiro and others who had recently worked to restore and reopen Old Labor Hall. They came up with a plan to restore the nearby bakery building and re-establish it as a baking school, where young people could learn to bake – and, in the process, pick up a little of Barre’s rich historic past. The name for the new enterprise? “Rise Up Bakery.”
A kickstarter campaign last year raised $25,000, several grants and baking advice came in, and a team of local young people from Youth Build helped replace the roof.
There’s a lot more work to do to get the new baking school up and running. But Shapiro and others are confident - and they’ve already reminded all of us that Vermont has long been considerably more than simply a land of quaint villages, quite farms and contented cows.
