Four Dollars and a Dream - The Story of Peter Christensen - Part 3 - Bell Bakery

 Part 3 of Pete's Story - read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

1907 and 1908 were the years of change for Pete. In 1907 he traveled to California, planting seeds for what would later become a major change in direction, and in 1908 he went back to Denmark. Why he returned isn’t known, but when he re-entered the U.S. he was listed as a “non-immigrant alien.” He arrived back in Iowa in March. Sometime in this time period he met Clarence H. Bell, a bakery owner in Missouri Valley, Iowa. How they made their acquaintance isn’t apparent. Missouri Valley is about 25 miles from Council Bluffs. Bell, a 38-year-old business man teamed up with the 24-year-old baker and they went into business together. In 1908 they bought the City Bakery in Huron, South Dakota, a location neither man had ties to, but the City Bakery was a good acquisition after a number of failures for previous owners. Bell explained, “I first saw the town in 1908. I had come up to South Dakota from Missouri Valley, Iowa, where I had been in the bakery business for 10 years. I felt that this state showed great possibilities, so I looked several cities over and finally decided on Huron. Huron didn’t have a bakery then, and I knew I could make money there. It kept me hopping about 16 hours a day, and a half a day on Sunday.”

Bell Bakery is the two-story wood frame building to the left of the large Costain Music Store.

They purchased the bakery on September 23 and relocated to Huron immediately. The Bell Bakery was open for business by October 17, advertising that they took phone orders and made deliveries, and their products were already on store shelves. Bell ran the business and Pete produced the products. Together they were a profitable team. Pete had a good work ethic and was a hard worker. The products put out by Bell Bakery were high quality, and while there were other bakeries in town over the years, Bell Bakery had no real competition.

The Bell Bakery delivery cart, about 1909

The bakers: Pete Christensen is pictured 2nd from right, and his
brother Soren is 3rd from right.  Photo taken about 1911.

Pete lived in an apartment above the bakery. Two of his three brothers also became bakers, and one of them, Soren, worked and lived with Pete for 7 years. After service in World War I, Soren went on to have a lengthy and successful baking career in Omaha, Nebraska, where many members of the family had migrated to.

While Clarence Bell was an astute businessman, Pete was responsible for the products they put out. He was especially known for his Fruit-Filled Cookies and people would come from miles around for them, especially at Christmas time. His daughter, Lillian, still remembered them 50 years afterward.

Pete’s recipes were written down, but only as a list of ingredients. He kept the details “in his head.” One of his ingredients was referred to only as “ammonia.” This odd sounding ingredient actually refers to baker’s ammonia, or ammonium bicarbonate, which was used as a leavening agent before baking soda or baking powder were used. When heated, the ammonium bicarbonate breaks down into ammonia, water, and carbon dioxide, the latter of which causes the baked goods to rise, but the ammonia can affect the flavor. Therefore, it was only used in relatively "flat" baked goods like cookies, so that the ammonia gas could escape.

On May 6, 1911, Pete married Gabriella “Ella” Monsen, a Norwegian immigrant who came to the U. S. at age 19, just three years after Pete. She was the first in her family to leave Norway, her widowed mother saving money to pay her passage. She went to her paternal aunt near Howard, South Dakota, about 60 miles from Huron, to learn English. How or when Pete and Ella became acquainted isn’t known, but Ella worked as a household servant in Norway and may have done likewise in Huron too. They purchased a home on Beach avenue in Huron and started their family a year later. Their children were: Lillian (b. 1912), Raymond (b. 1914), Clarence (b. 1917), Edna (b. 1919) and Sylvia (b. 1924).

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In 1914 there were big changes for Bell Bakery. The land on which the building sat was to be the site of the new 3-story I.O.O.F. building, so Bell Bakery had to move – building and all. As the local newspaper of July 16, 1914, reported, “The Bell Bakery is now comfortably located on Fourth street just off the avenue, after a somewhat tempestuous journey across the street and around the corner. The building held together very well, until nearly in place, when a section of the south wall bulged badly. This will not, however, be a serious matter, as it was braced up at once. Work on the new Odd Fellow block will begin at once.” In the photo to the left, you can see the two-story building with the braces through the front windows.  The new I.O.O.F. building was completed toward the end of October, and Bell Bakery moved into one of the two ground-level store spaces. The old wood-frame building was to be sold to the highest bidder in December, to be moved immediately.

Above: The new I.O.O.F. building, with Bell Bakery on the main floor in the store front to the right.

The back room of the bakery.  Pete is pictured at left.

In addition to pastries, cookies, and specialty cakes, the bakery had a capacity of 10,000 loaves of bread daily.

In 1920, Pete’s life took a turn when he decided to get out of the bakery business. He sold his interest to Erwin Schmidt, a native of Germany who was raised in Minnesota. In 1915 Schmidt had moved to Huron and taken a job at the A. W. Hopkins bakery. Schmidt would eventually become sole owner of Bell Bakery when Clarence Bell retired in 1931.

To be continued...

Some photos courtesy of Cynthia Christensen and Ree Lyons

Four Dollars and a Dream - The Story of Peter Christensen - Part 2 - The Immigration

 Part 2 of Pete's Story - read Part 1 here.

The S. S. New York

It was April 20, 1901 when Pete boarded the ocean liner S. S. New York from Southampton, England. Southampton was a major, established point of departure for transatlantic voyages. At the time of this boat’s launch in 1893 it was called The City of New York and was the largest and fastest ocean liner crossing the Atlantic. The massive boat was 528 feet long and 63 feet wide and could accommodate 290 first-class, 250 second class, and 725 third-class passengers. This ship, in 1912, had the notoriety of nearly colliding with the Titanic on the latter ship’s maiden voyage departing Southampton.

Pete stepped foot on American soil on April 30 after a ten-day journey. He was 16 years and 11 months old, could read and write, and claimed “farmer” as vocation. His final destination was Exira, Iowa, where surprisingly his maternal grandfather, Peder C. Larsen lived. From there, he boarded a train for Iowa.

Peder and Jacobine Larsen

Pete’s grandparents, Peder and Jacobina Larsen, had immigrated between 1890 and 1895 in order to join the rest of their children - Soren, Niels, Anna and Kjersten - who had come to the United States about 1886. Their daughter Elsie, Pete’s mother, was the only one of their children opting to stay in Denmark.

It was said that Pete learned the baking trade from an uncle in Omaha, Nebraska, but there is no known uncle in Omaha at that particular time. Pete appears to have stayed in Exira until 1903, possibly helping out on his uncle and grandfather’s farm. In 1903, his older sister Katrina and her family immigrated and joined Pete in Exira. Katrina’s husband, Jens Jensen, was a baker in Denmark and established himself in that occupation in Council Bluffs, Iowa. About the same time, Pete also moved to Council Bluffs, where he learned the baking trade and worked for bakers in the city for the next four years. It is entirely possible that he apprenticed with his brother-in-law, Jens Jensen.

One by one, most of his siblings made their way to Iowa, several of them helped by Pete to immigrate, and he helped them get settled. His brother Chris and sister Katrina arrived in 1903; Laura in 1908; Caroline in 1909; Soren in 1910; and Martinas in 1911 and Mary sometime before 1919. Only Gjertrud stayed behind in Denmark.

Back in Denmark, Pete’s mother Elsie married Jens Eriksen, a neighbor 11 years her junior, and the two of them also immigrated in 1911, settling in Omaha, Nebraska, across the river from Council Bluffs.

To be continued...

Four Dollars and a Dream - The Story of Peter Christensen - Part 1 - The Beginning

I didn’t grow up knowing much about Pete Christensen except he was born in Denmark, owned Bell Bakery in Huron, and could be a little prickly for his family to get along with. It wasn’t until I started researching his life that I discovered that there is a lot more to my great-grandfather that just those three facts.  

To understand Pete, you have to understand where he came from.  His story began in Døstrup, Hinstead Herred, Ålborg County, Denmark, the land where his father's family lived for several generations  His father, Laust (also known as Lars) Christian Christensen was a lieutenant in the Danish army, whose parents died young,  He married Elsie Kirstine Pedersen from Torslev in November of 1880, three months after the birth of their first child, Ane Katrine.  Their second child, Gjertrud, was named after Laust's mother. and then came Peter, on the 18th of May, 1884, the third of eleven children and the oldest son

Laust/Lars & Elsie Christensen

In 1890, the family lived on a farm and consisted of Laust (33), Elsie (30), Gjertrud (8), Peder (5) and Marianne (3). Laust was a farmer. “Katrina” was about ten years old and is not listed in the household. The family was poor – as soon as the kids reached ten or twelve years of age, they were sent to live in other households to work – the boys as farm laborers, and the girls as household servants, taking care of kids and keeping house. Katrina had likely assumed these duties in another household by this time.

By 1896, Laust acquired the position of “landpost”, or our equivalent of a postman. The last of their eleven children, Karl, was born in 1900 and died the same year at eight months of age. Life was hard; Laust had tuberculosis and was unable to do his job much of the time so Elsie quietly did it in his place.

Sometime before the year 1900, it had been Pete’s turn to leave his parents’ household and provide for himself. He was working as a farm laborer in 1900, some distance from home. Laust Christensen succumbed to tuberculosis in March of 1901 at the age of 44. Within a month 16 year old Peter Christensen was on a boat bound for the United States with $4 in his pocket.

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Before continuing with Pete’s journey, I think it’s important to know some of what the younger children experienced after the death of their father. Elsie still had four children in the household ranging in age from four to nine, and she needed a way to support them. With Laust’s job gone, she packed up her family and moved to the city where she took a job at a brewery. The older children took care of the younger children but they were largely on their own. Her daughter Caroline, seven years old at the time, recalled in her diary, “I don’t remember when we got ready for school, but it was up to Laura to see that we got ready. The boys were so young. I know there were times we never got to school.” She went on to say, “Sometimes Mother would lock us in our apartment for a whole day and we had to feed ourselves. As we got older, we were a wild bunch. Laura would get us into all kinds of mischief. I know we sometimes even stole things. We used to take a sack and go down to the harbor when the big ships would come in. They would bring coal in from foreign lands. We would pick it up when they spilled some. That was what we kept warm with. I know we were poor, but Mother would not take help from anyone.” She described her mother as a “beautiful, proud woman,” but also “hard” and not very affectionate toward her children. As the children were sent to other households, most were compliant, but Laura ran away several times. It was a hard life for them, and they rarely went to see their mother once they left the household. They were required to stay in the other homes until their confirmation, at which time most of them left Denmark completely.

To be continued...

Some photos courtesy of Barbara Johnson and Cynthia Christensen