Last updated: December 22, 2020
Place
The Bake House
NPS Photo
Quick Facts
Amenities
2 listed
Historical/Interpretive Information/Exhibits, Wheelchair Accessible
As it does today, bread served as a major focus during the fur trade era, providing much-needed carbohydrates to the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) employee diet. While the oven in the Kitchen provided some bread for the gentlemen's table in the Chief Factor's House, three to four bakers labored long hours here in front of the Bake House's massive twin ovens, preparing bread and biscuit for hundreds of other company employees.
After 1841, employees at Fort Vancouver received a daily ration of 1.5 pounds of biscuit when potatoes were unavailable, and it was often of the lowest quality - called sea biscuit or hardtack. The bakers would have baked it in ovens similar to those reconstructed in the Bake House at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site - but that would not have been their only responsibility. Sailors assigned to vessels engaged in the HBC's coastal trade needed a source of bread, as did the annual fur brigades and other travelers. Biscuit and bread from this bakery met these needs, and traveled overland and overseas as extensively as the fur trade engagés who consumed it.
To more easily meet these demands, at least one of the bakers lived in the building's attic. The ovens needed to be stoked and tended around the clock to ensure consistent baking temperature. And, just as today, the bakers began work very early in the morning in order to give any leavened bread time to rise before baking.
The Bake House was completed in the fall of 1844, replacing two earlier bake houses at other locations within the stockade. Historical research and archaeological investigation helped the National Park Service determine the original size and interior layout of this building.
The Bake House you see at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site today is a reconstruction of the original, built on the archaeological footprint of the Bake House that stood there from 1844 until the 1860s.
After 1841, employees at Fort Vancouver received a daily ration of 1.5 pounds of biscuit when potatoes were unavailable, and it was often of the lowest quality - called sea biscuit or hardtack. The bakers would have baked it in ovens similar to those reconstructed in the Bake House at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site - but that would not have been their only responsibility. Sailors assigned to vessels engaged in the HBC's coastal trade needed a source of bread, as did the annual fur brigades and other travelers. Biscuit and bread from this bakery met these needs, and traveled overland and overseas as extensively as the fur trade engagés who consumed it.
To more easily meet these demands, at least one of the bakers lived in the building's attic. The ovens needed to be stoked and tended around the clock to ensure consistent baking temperature. And, just as today, the bakers began work very early in the morning in order to give any leavened bread time to rise before baking.
The Bake House was completed in the fall of 1844, replacing two earlier bake houses at other locations within the stockade. Historical research and archaeological investigation helped the National Park Service determine the original size and interior layout of this building.
The Bake House you see at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site today is a reconstruction of the original, built on the archaeological footprint of the Bake House that stood there from 1844 until the 1860s.