Vieh’s Bakery
Myrtle and Edward Vieh, shown here in 1931, used money from a land purchase in Montana to open a bakery in Memphis.
Dear Vance:
Memphis has had many fine bakeries, but the one favored by my family was called Vieh’s. It’s been gone for years, but what can you tell me about it?
— T.Y., Memphis.
Vieh’s, just down the street from the Gilmore, sold “Good Things To Eat.”
Dear T.Y.: In 1931, the Memphis Press-Scimitar — our city’s afternoon newspaper, if you can remember such a thing — began publishing a series called “Memphis People Tell How They Made Their First Stake of $1,000.” As you might imagine, these stories began with an account of the Lauderdales’ venture with dirigibles, a fascinating story told in Volume 14 of Bound for Glory, the 32-volume biography of my illustrious family. But the October 22, 1931, edition of the paper told the remarkable story of the Vieh family, noting that when Edward Vieh “laid his hands on his first grand, he was many, many miles from a bakery.”
In fact, he and his new wife were struggling to survive in the mountains of Montana. I don’t have a great deal of information about Vieh’s early days — I can only do so much, despite being a Lauderdale. Edward Vieh, it seems, was born in St. Louis in 1888. With very little formal education, he managed to work at bakeries in that town, and in 1912, at the age of 24, he met and married Myrtle Seefluth.
As a young man, the newspaper reported, “His health was poor and general working conditions were not much better, so he decided to take his doctor’s and Horace Greeley’s advice and ‘Go West.’”
With only $300 borrowed from his grandfather, Vieh bought a stake in a farmstead outside of Lewistown, Montana, and moved there. It was simply open country. He and Myrtle lived in a tent until they constructed a tiny, nine-foot-square cabin, and almost by hand plowed and seeded their land, cultivating some 80 acres and slowly acquiring mules, horses, cattle, poultry, goats, and other animals. “The loneliness was unbearable,” says the Press-Scimitar, “but they stuck it out for five years,” and during this time two children were born in the wilderness, without any help from a doctor or nurse.
In 1917, they sold their ranch and livestock for $1,200 — making their first “grand” (a good sum of money in those days) — and returned to St. Louis. His health much improved by the hard work he’d put into their homestead, Vieh took a job with Barker Bakeries in that city, a national chain, where he was soon put in charge of overseeing the “installation” of bakeries in other cities. The Viehs moved to Memphis in 1920, where Edward became manager of the Barker Bakery at 12 South Main Street.
In 1924, the Viehs decided to open their own bakery, a nice shop on McLean, just a few doors north of Madison. This was a bustling part of town, and their business certainly improved with the construction of the Gilmore Apartments in 1929, just across Madison. Three years later, they opened a second bakery at Overton Park Avenue and Willett, added a third location at 1354 Poplar, and later embarked on another venture, Vieh’s Biscuits, at 569 South Highland.
Edward Vieh died in 1944; I wasn’t able to determine when his wife passed away. The bakeries were taken over by his eldest son, Eugene, and thrived for years. The photo here (left), taken in the 1950s, shows the original location on North McLean, with the Gilmore Apartments visible in the distance. It’s too bad the image isn’t in color, but it’s obviously a handsome building, with the Vieh name and “V” in a half dozen places, and the bakery’s motto, “Makers and Bakers of Good Things to Eat,” spelled out in glowing neon.
An interesting aspect of this story is the private park the Viehs owned behind their home on James Road in Raleigh. Described by the Press-Scimitar as “the family’s free camp in the woods,” this land was often used by church groups for various outings. In 1949, Timberline Bible School, among many others, held outdoor classes for hundreds of children here. What’s more, once a week, all bakery employees, along with anybody else who cared to join in, gathered in the back of the little shop on McLean for a 15-minute devotional, “a spiritual recipe that keeps the bakery in harmony,” according to a newspaper account.
By 1965, all the Vieh bakeries had closed. The original location on North McLean served for a while as the home of Rogers Church Goods, but that row of shops was later demolished for a parking lot. The Overton Park Avenue address became Vogue Cleaners, and the Poplar branch was turned into El Capitan, a dance club. The biscuit company on South Highland was converted into another well-known Memphis bakery, McLaurine’s. Vieh Park still shows up on some maps of Raleigh, but it is rarely used, if at all, and little noticed by anyone who drives by the entrance on James Road.
The American Company
Dear Vance:
What can you tell me about my old talcum powder tin, made by the American Company in Memphis?
— D.T., Baldwyn, MS.
Dear D.T.: I really love the colorful design of your Zuané Le Parot talc, which despite the French spelling and Central American macaw, was produced — as it clearly says on the label — by the American Company in Memphis.
It took quite a bit of digging to track down this company, because it was only in business from 1934 to 1938. It turns out, though, that this was just one branch of a much larger firm called the William Webster Company, which was — so they claimed — the first full-scale pharmaceutical manufacturing company in the Southeast.
Webster was born in Weatherby, Missouri, in 1873. In 1903, he showed up in Memphis, listed in old city directories working for the Lillybeck Drug Company here. Just two years later, he and a partner, Ernest Warnock, formed the William Webster Company, with offices and production facilities at 224 East, close to the medical district. I don’t have a complete list of everything made there, but we can presume it was an extensive range of medications and cosmetic products. It would be interesting to know why they established a separate division — the American Company — and how many of their other products were designed so exotically; so far I haven’t been able to answer those questions.
Webster passed away in 1955, but control of the firm had already been handed to his son, William Webster Jr., a native Memphian who attended the old Pentacost-Garrison School here and later Washington and Lee University.
“Billy,” as he was known to all, served in the Navy during World War II, and then joined his father’s business, starting as a salesman and taking over as president in 1950. The company greatly expanded during the 1960s, moving into larger facilities in the Airport Industrial Park. In 1973, William Webster Company merged with Alcon Laboratories in Houston. In Memphis, Billy oversaw the Webcon Division of Alcon Labs until he retired in 1979. He passed away in 2015. The old company location on East is, as you read so often here, now a parking lot.
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Mail: Vance Lauderdale, Memphis magazine,460 Tennessee Street #200, Memphis, TN 38103
