Collin Street Bakery

The bakery's reach came after its founders. Wikipedia reports that L. W. McNutt Sr., Harry Cook and Bob Rutherford bought the bakery in 1946 and that a mail-order business followed in 1947, built by copying names and addresses out of phone books. McNutt's son, Lee William McNutt Jr., took the cakes into international direct marketing, with orders by mail, phone, fax and later online and an early computerized customer database. The Handbook of Texas says the DeLuxe fruitcakes reached all fifty states and 195 countries.

What the plaque says

Collin Street Bakery Opened two blocks north of this site in 1896, by August Weidmann, an immigrant baker from Wiesbaden, Germany, and W. T. McElwee, a local cotton buyer. Combining the talents of a baker whose pride and joy was baking a better cake with the flare of a man whose business ability had a touch of the sensational was a move that resulted in a most unusual and successful business enterprise. One of Weidmann's few assets was an unknown cake recipe. This was to become the famous original "deluxe fruitcake," today shipped to every state in the United States and to many foreign countries. McElwee, a lover of sports and the theatre, built a rooming house over the bakery in 1906, and invited visiting baseball players, circus performers and vaudeville troupes to stay there. Soon guests were having fruitcakes shipped to friends in remote places. Employees at the bakery during this era recall visits from Will Rogers, Enrico Caruso, John J. McGraw, "Gentlemen Jim" Corbett and many other celebrities. They also recall the day the great circus showman, John Ringling, and many of his famous performers stopped in an ordered Christmas cakes sent to their many friends in distant lands. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Petroleum Industry Park — steps away
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.
• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 20 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Ellis County Courthouse — 30 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.

More markers nearby

• Birthsite of Beauford H. Jester — steps away
• First Baptist Church of Corsicana — steps away
• Samuel Wistar Johnson, M. D. — steps away
• Corsicana Public Library — steps away