The Bakery War on Holly Street
A bitter rivalry between two Whatcom bakers escalated into a criminal attempt to poison customers with concentrated lye.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Rivalry between local bake shops in Whatcom would have resulted in a wholesale killing of innocent people had it not been that the bakers who attempted to injure their enemies overdid the thing. John Birk and James Henry conduct rival bake shops on West Holly Street in this city, and bitter feeling exists between them. Some time ago, some flour consigned to Henry came with a shipment of Birk's goods. Birk, so it is charged, instructed his baker, William Burwent, to put a quantity of concentrated lye in Henry's flour. This order Burwent is alleged to have followed. Henry's baker tasted of the flour and burned his tongue severely. After the flour had been baked into bread, Henry's baker had some of it analyzed, and this analysis is said to have shown the presence of enough concentrated lye to kill every person who ate as little as is ordinarily consumed during a meal. Burwent found that the presence of lye had been discovered in the flour and left town before the sheriff could serve a warrant on him. Today he came back, and both he and Birk were arrested.
“This analysis is said to have shown the presence of enough concentrated lye to kill every person who ate as little as is ordinarily consumed during a meal.”
This violent episode over business competition on West Holly Street serves as a grim reminder of how cutthroat small-town commercial rivalries could turn in early 20th-century Washington. It reflects a time when food safety regulations were virtually non-existent, leaving the public vulnerable to the personal feuds of business owners.
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