#baker — Public Fediverse posts

HAPPY CINCO DE MAYO to all my Mexican compadres + happy birthday Dave Dostie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oemt1PvFiM0
#davedostie #drummer #baker #sanfrancisco #paulgilbert #johnnyjblair #birthday #beatles #thewho

Hype for the Future 172G → Communities in Northern Florida

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/04/21/hype-for-the-future-172g-%e2%86%92-communities-in-northern-florida/

Hype for the Future 172G → Communities in Northern Florida

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/04/21/hype-for-the-future-172g-%e2%86%92-communities-in-northern-florida/

Hype for the Future 172G → Communities in Northern Florida

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/04/21/hype-for-the-future-172g-%e2%86%92-communities-in-northern-florida/

Hype for the Future 172G → Communities in Northern Florida

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/04/21/hype-for-the-future-172g-%e2%86%92-communities-in-northern-florida/

Hype for the Future 172G → Communities in Northern Florida

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/04/21/hype-for-the-future-172g-%e2%86%92-communities-in-northern-florida/

I Love Loaves

#bread #loaf #baker #bakery #rustic #wood #table #stilllife #color #artisanal #flour #floury #crust #crusty #food
#photography #bnwphotography #blackandwhitephotography #monochromephotography #stilllifephotography
#jlbouzou

Round Loaf

#bread #loaf #baker #bakery #rustic #wood #table #stilllife #color #artisanal #flour #floury #crust #crusty #food
#photography #stilllifephotography #colorphotography #foodphotography
#jlbouzou

https://www.europesays.com/news/11376/ L.A. County sheriff’s deputy dies during Baker to Vegas relay race #baker #department #deputy #family #Headlines #LACountySheriff #LosAngelesCountySheriff #MedicalEmergency #News #office #PoliceDepartment #statement #station #team #thousand #TopStories #VegasRelayRace #X

Chef de Paw is ready to take your order. 😂 https://1-lisas-baker.pixels.com/featured/chef-de-paw-lisa-s-baker.html

#chef #bulldog #dog #englishbulldog #dogs #dogsOfFedi #dogsofmastodon #pup #art #arte #artwork #wallart #homedecor #artforhome #artforsale #buyintoart #artprints #canvasprints #mastoart #fediart #fediverse #fedigiftshop #puzzles #puzzle #kicthenart #kitchendecor #cuteanimals #animals #mammals #cute #baker #cook #restaurant

Muistin just että en oo tänne muistanu päivitellä mitään vähään aikaan 🤭 Noh mutta siis kävin töiden puolesta terveystarkastuksessa ja siellä nousi esiin mun rasitusastma. Sitähän ei oo tutkittu mitenkään ja hoitaja heti otti vakavasti tutkimuksiin koska leipomoalalla astma on yks ammattitauti.

Sain sit kotiin semmosen PEF- seurantapaketin, semmosen putkilon johon piti puhaltaa kaks kertaa päivässä ja se mittas sitä puhallusvoimaa. Kahden viikon seuranta, päivän eka näyte heti ku nousee sängystä ylös ja kolme puhallusta putkeen, sit avaavaa astmalääkettä ja sit taas 15min päästä uudet kolme puhallusnäytettä. Iltaisin sama homma. Välillä unohdin iltapuhallukset mutta muuten muistin! 👏🏻 Vein toissapäivänä täytetyt näytepaperit hoitajalle ja mul on viikon päästä sit spirometria aika ja sit sen jälkeen lääkärin soittoaika.

Mulla jatkuvasti tuli lukemaks 350 ja kun pyysin testiks @LaraMint puhaltaan siihen putkeen ni lukemaks tuli 600 😂🙈

Oon tästä avoimesti töissä puhunu ja samalla laittanu ajatusrattaat päässä pyöriin et mitäs sitte jos leipurin hommat loppuu. Nohevana sit tilailin jo kynsiporaa, kynsiteknikon lamppua ja käsitukityynyä yms että ainakin vois jonkun ihan ammatillisen kynsikurssin käydä ja ruveta tekeen niitä jos ei muuta keksi. Ripsetkin kiinnostais 🤔

#new #career #maybe #lets #see #astma #baker #life

Titans’ Elic Ayomanor out, Darrell Baker questionable vs. Seattle

The Tennessee T…
#NFL #TennesseeTitans #Tennessee #Titans #American #AmericanFootball #Baker #Corey #CoreyLevin #Darrell #DarrellBakerJr. #ernest #ErnestJonesIV #Football #Hub #iii #iv #Jones #Jr. #kenneth #KennethWalkerIII #Levin #Negative #news #NFLHub #Overall #OverallNegative #Seahawks #Seattle #SeattleSeahawks #SMG #SMGTimely #Sports #SportsNews #Timely #walker #woods #Xavier #XavierWoods
https://www.rawchili.com/nfl/544696/

Titans’ Elic Ayomanor out, Darrell Baker questionable vs. Seattle

The Tennessee T…
#NFL #TennesseeTitans #Tennessee #Titans #American #AmericanFootball #Baker #Corey #CoreyLevin #Darrell #DarrellBakerJr. #ernest #ErnestJonesIV #Football #Hub #iii #iv #Jones #Jr. #kenneth #KennethWalkerIII #Levin #Negative #news #NFLHub #Overall #OverallNegative #Seahawks #Seattle #SeattleSeahawks #SMG #SMGTimely #Sports #SportsNews #Timely #walker #woods #Xavier #XavierWoods
https://www.rawchili.com/nfl/544696/

Titans’ Elic Ayomanor out, Darrell Baker questionable vs. Seattle https://www.rawchili.com/nfl/544696/ #American #AmericanFootball #Baker #Corey #CoreyLevin #Darrell #DarrellBakerJr. #ernest #ErnestJonesIV #Football #Hub #iii #iv #Jones #Jr. #kenneth #KennethWalkerIII #Levin #Negative #news #NFL #NFLHub #Overall #OverallNegative #Seahawks #Seattle #SeattleSeahawks #SMG #SMGTimely #Sports #SportsNews #Tennessee #TennesseeTitans #TennesseeTitans #Timely #Titans #walker #woods #Xavier #XavierWoods

Titans’ Elic Ayomanor out, Darrell Baker questionable vs. Seattle https://www.rawchili.com/nfl/544696/ #American #AmericanFootball #Baker #Corey #CoreyLevin #Darrell #DarrellBakerJr. #ernest #ErnestJonesIV #Football #Hub #iii #iv #Jones #Jr. #kenneth #KennethWalkerIII #Levin #Negative #news #NFL #NFLHub #Overall #OverallNegative #Seahawks #Seattle #SeattleSeahawks #SMG #SMGTimely #Sports #SportsNews #Tennessee #TennesseeTitans #TennesseeTitans #Timely #Titans #walker #woods #Xavier #XavierWoods

Wer Lust hat am Mo, den 29. September 2025 um 18 Uhr mit auf eine kleine Tour zur Künstlerboheme der 1920er Jahre im Neuen Westen von #Berlin zu gehen: Wir treffen uns an der Uhr in der Eingangshalle der U-Bahn #Wittenbergplatz. Mit dabei sind John Höxter, Bert #Brecht und Trude #Hesterberg, der 'Rote Richard' und die Gebrüder #Saß, Marlene #Dietrich und Josefine #Baker, Josef #Roth, Erich #Kästner und viele andere auch.#Geschichte #Stadtführung

Viele #Frauen sind nur auf ihren guten #Ruf bedacht; aber die anderen werden #glücklich.
(Josephine #Baker)
#psychotHHerapie #Zitat #Zitate #JosephineBaker

https://www.jangoeritz.de/zitate

“Labor Is Life” (U.S. Postal Service’s Labor Day Stamp, 1956, U.S. Library of Congress, public domain).

Bakers, blacksmiths, boatmen, butchers, carpenters, cabinetmakers, cigarmakers, coal miners, factory workers, farmers, gardeners, gold miners, iron workers, masons, quarry workers, teamsters, tombstone carvers. These were just a few of the diverse job titles held by the laborers who enlisted with the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry during the American Civil War.

Many returned to their same occupations after the war ended while others found new pathways for their life journeys. Far too many were never able to return to the arms of their loved ones and still rest in marked or unmarked graves far from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

In honor of Labor Day, 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers: One Civil War Regiment’s Story is proud to present this abridged list of blue-collar men and boys who served with the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry between August 1861 and January 1866, as well as the names of two of the women associated with the regiment who made their own unforgettable marks on the world.

* Auchmuty, Samuel S. (First Lieutenant, Company D): A native of Duncannon, Perry County and veteran of the Mexican-American War who was employed as a carpenter during the early 1860s, Samuel Auchmuty responded to President Abraham Lincoln’s call for volunteers to defend the nation’s capital during the opening weeks of the American Civil War by enrolling as a first lieutenant with Company D of the newly-formed 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry on August 20, 1861; after completing his three-year term of enlistment, he was honorably discharged in September 1864 and returned home to Pennsylvania, where he resumed his work as a house carpenter and launched a successful contracting business that was responsible for building new business structures, churches, single-family homes, and schools, as well as renovating existing structures; he died in 1891, following a brief illness;

First Sergeant Christian S. Beard, circa 1863 (public domain).

* Beard, Christian Seiler (First Lieutenant, Company C): A twenty-seven-year-old, married carpenter residing in Williamsport, Lycoming County when President Abraham Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to defend the nation’s capital, following the fall of Fort Sumter in mid-April 1865, Chistian S. Beard promptly enrolled for Civil War military service before that month was out as a private with Company D of the 11th Pennsylvania Volunteers; honorably discharged in July after completing his Three Months’ Service, he re-enlisted as a sergeant with Company C of the newly-formed 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers on August 19; after rising up through the ranks to become a first lieutenant, he was honorably discharged on Christmas Day, 1865, and returned home to his wife in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, where he continued to work as a carpenter; after having several children with his wife, he was widowed by her; remarried in 1884, he relocated with his wife and children to Pittsburgh, where he continued to work as a carpenter; ailing with heart and kidney disease, he died there on November 16, 1911 and was interred at that city’s Highwood Cemetery;

* Burke, Thomas (Sergeant, Company I): A first-generation American, Thomas Burke was a twenty-year-old cabinetmaker residing in Allentown at the dawn of the American Civil War; after enrolling for military service on the day that the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry was founded (August 5, 1861), he was officially mustered in as a private; from that point on, he continued to work his way up the ranks, receiving a promotion to corporal on September 19, 1864 and then to sergeant on July 11, 1865; honorably mustered out with his company in Charleston, South Carolina on December 25, 1865, he returned home to Lehigh County, where he married and began a family; sometime in early to mid-1871, he and his family migrated west to Iowa, settling in Anamosa, Jones County, where he was employed as a carpenter and contractor; he died at his home there on October 22, 1910 and was buried at that town’s Riverside Cemetery;

* Colvin, John Dorrance (Second Lieutenant, Company C): A native of Abington Township, Lackawanna County who was a farmer when he enlisted for Civil War military service on September 12, 1861, John D. Colvin transferred to the U.S. Army Signal Corps on October 13, 1863, and continued to serve with the Signal Corps for the duration of the war; employed as an engineer, post-war, he helped the Pacific Railroad to extend its service from Atchison, Kansas to Fort Kearney in Nebraska before returning home to Pennsylvania, where he married, began a family and resided with them in Olyphant and Carbondale before relocating with them to Parsons in Luzerne County, where he became a prominent civic leader and member of the school board; initially employed as a machinist, he went on to become superintendent of the Delaware & Hudson Coal company before taking a similar job with the Lehigh Valley Coal Company; the U.S. Postal Service’s postmaster of Parsons during the early 1890s, he died there on March 15, 1901 and was buried at the Hollenback Cemetery in Wilkes-Barre;

* Crownover, James (Sergeant, Company D): A twenty-three-year-old teamster residing in Blain, Perry County when he enrolled for Civil War military service on August 20, 1861, James Crownover rose up through the ranks of the 47th Pennsylvania from private to reach the rank of sergeant; wounded in the right shoulder and captured by Confederate troops during the Battle of Pleasant Hill, Louisiana on April 9, 1864, he was marched to Camp Ford, near Tyler, Texas, the largest Confederate prison camp west of the Mississippi River, where he was held as a prisoner of war (POW) until he was released during a prisoner exchange on November 25, 1864; during captivity, he was commissioned, but not mustered as a second lieutenant; given medical treatment before he was returned to active duty, he was honorably discharged with his regiment in Charleston, South Carolina on December 25, 1865; after returning home, he found work at a tannery near Blain, married, began a family and then relocated with them to East Huntingdon Township, Westmoreland County, where he worked as a teamster; relocating with them to Braddock in Allegheny County after the turn of the century, he worked at a local mill there; he died in Allegheny County on July 18, 1903 and was buried at the Monongahela Cemetery in Braddock Hills;

Jacob Daub, circa 1862-1865 (carte de visite, Cooley & Beckett Photographers, Savannah, Georgia and Beaufort and Hilton Head, South Carolina, public domain).

* Daub, Jacob and William J. (Drummer Boy, Company A): A German immigrant as a child, Jacob Daub emigrated with his parents and younger brother, William, circa 1852; after settling in Easton, Northampton County, Pennsylvania, where his father found work as a stone mason, Jacob grew up to become a cigarmaker, and also became the first of the two brothers to enlist in the American Civil War; after enrolling at the age of sixteen, he was classified as a field musician and assigned to Company A as its drummer boy; his nineteen-year-old brother, William, a carpenter by 1865, followed him into the war when he enlisted as a private with the same company in February of that year; after the war ended, both returned home to Northampton County, where they married, had children and went on to live long, full lives; William eventually died at the age of eighty in 1928, followed by Jacob, who passed away in 1936, roughly two months before his ninety-first birthday;

* Detweiler, Charles C. (Private, Company A): Berks County native Charles Detweiler enrolled for Civil War military service on September 16, 1862; a carpenter who later became a farmer, he served with Company A until he was severely injured in the Battle of Cedar Creek, Virginia, October 19, 1864, when he sustained a musket ball wound to the middle of his thigh; treated at a Union Army hospital in Virginia before being transported to the Union’s Mower General Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he learned that the musket ball had damaged his femur and femoral arteries; following his wound-related death at Mower on March 12, 1865, he was buried at the Fairview Cemetery in Kutztown, Berks County;

* Diaz, John (Private, Company I): An immigrant from Spain’s Canary Islands, John Diaz emigrated sometime between 1862 and 1865 and settled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he found work as a cigarmaker; on January 25, 1865, at the age of nineteen, he enlisted with the Union Army at a recruiting depot in Norristown, Montgomery County and served as a private with Company I of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry until it was mustered out on Christmas Day, 1865; following his return to Pennsylvania, he resumed work as a cigarmaker in Philadelphia, eventually launching his own cigarmaking firm, which became a family business as his sons became old enough to work for him; sometime between 1906 and 1910, he relocated with his wife and several of his children to Camden County, New Jersey, where he died on September 5, 1915;

James Downs (circa 1880s, public domain).

* Downs, James (Corporal, Company D): A twenty-three-year-old tanner residing in Blain, Perry County when he enrolled for Civil War military service on August 20, 1861, James Downs was captured by Confederate troops during the Battle of Pleasant Hill, Louisiana on April 9, 1864 and marched to Camp Ford, near Tyler, Texas, the largest Confederate prison camp west of the Mississippi River; held there as a prisoner of war (POW) until he was released during a prisoner exchange on July 22, 1864, he received medical treatment and was subsequently returned to active duty; following his honorable discharge with his regiment in Charleston, South Carolina, on December 25, 1865, he returned home, married, began a family and relocated with his family to Phillipsburg, New Jersey; suffering from heart and kidney disease, and possibly also from post-traumatic stress disorder, rather than “insane” as physicians at the Pennsylvania Memorial Home in Brookville, Jefferson County, Pennsylvania had diagnosed him, he fell from a window at that home and died at there on September 16, 1921; he was subsequently interred in the Veterans’ Circle of the Brookville Cemetery;

* Eagle, Augustus (Second Lieutenant, Company F): A German immigrant as a teenager, Augustus Eagle arrived in America on June 23, 1855, two years after his brother, Frederick Eagle, had emigrated and made a life for himself in Catasauqua, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania; both men married and began families there, with Fred employed as a laborer and Gus employed by the Crane Iron Works; when President Abraham Lincoln issued his call for volunteers to defend the nation’s capital during the opening weeks of the American Civil War, both men enrolled for military service on August 21, 1861 as privates with Company F of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry; in 1862, Fred fell ill and was honorably discharged on a surgeon’s certificate of disability, but Gus continued to serve, rising up through the regiment’s enlisted and officers’ ranks; commissioned as a second lieutenant, he was honorably discharged on September 11, 1864, upon completion of his three-year term of service; post-war, Fred became a successful baker with real estate and personal property valued at $4,200 (roughly $155,750 in 2023 dollars) and died in Catasauqua in 1885, while Gus owned a successful restaurant in Whitehall Township before operating the Fairview Hotel, which became a popular spot for political gatherings; after suffering a series of strokes in 1902, Gus died at his home on August 17 and was buried at the Fairview Cemetery in West Catasauqua;

* Eisenbraun, Alfred (Drummer Boy, Company B): A tobacco stripper and first-generation American from Allentown, Lehigh County, fifteen-year-old Alfred Eisenbraun became the second “man” from the 47th Pennsylvania to die when he succumbed to complications from typhoid fever at the Kalorama Eruptive Fever Hospital in Georgetown, District of Columbia on October 26, 1861; he still rests at the U.S. Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home Cemetery in Washington, D.C.;

* Fink, Aaron (Corporal, Company B): A shoemaker and native of Salisbury Township, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, Aaron Fink, grew up, began a family and established a successful small shoemaking business, first in Allentown and then in Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe) in Carbon County; on August 20, 1861, he chose to respond to President Abraham Lincoln’s call for volunteers to help bring the American Civil War to a quick end when he enrolled for military service; shot in the right leg during the fighting at the Frampton Plantation during the Battle of Pocotaligo, South Carolina on October 22, 1862, he was treated at the Union Army’s hospital at Hilton Head, South Carolina, but died there from wound-related complications on November 5, 1862; initially buried near that hospital, his remains were later exhumed by Allentown undertaker Paul Balliet and returned to Pennsylvania for reinterment at that city’s Union-West End Cemetery;

* Fornwald, Reily M. (Corporal, Company G): Born in Heidelberg Township, Berks County, Reily Fornwald was raised there on his family’s farm near Stouchsberg; educated in his community’s common schools and then at Millersville State Normal School, he became a railroad worker before returning to farm life shortly before the dawn of the American Civil War; after enlisting for military service at the age of twenty on September 11, 1862, he was wounded in the head and groin by an exploding artillery shell during the Battle of Pocotaligo, South Carolina on October 22, 1862; stabilized on the battlefield before being transported to a field hospital for more advanced medical care, he spent four weeks recuperating before returning to active duty with his regiment; promoted to the rank of corporal on January 19, 1863, he continued to serve with his regiment until he was honorably discharged at Berryville, Virginia on September 18, 1864, upon expiration of his term of enlistment; after returning home, he spent four years operating a blast furnace for White & Ferguson in Robesonia, Berks County; he also married and began a family; sometime around 1870, he left that job to become an engine operator for Wright, Cook & Co. in Sheridan and then moved to a job as an engine operator for William M. Kauffman—a position he held for roughly a decade before securing employment as a shifting engineer with the Reading Railway Company at its yards in Reading; following his retirement in 1905, he and his wife settled in Robesonia, where he became involved in buying and selling real estate; following a severe fall in May 1925, during which he fractured a thigh bone, he died at the Homeopathic Hospital in Reading on June 1 and was buried at Robesonia’s Heidelberg Cemetery;

Captain Reuben Shatto Gardner, Company H, 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers, circa 1863 (public domain).

* Gardner, Reuben Shatto, John A. and Jacob S. R.: Natives of Perry County, Reuben Shatto Gardner and his brothers, John A. Gardner and Jacob S. R. Gardner, began their work lives as laborers; among the earliest responders to President Abraham Lincoln’s call to defend the nation’s capital, following the fall of Fort Sumter in mid-April 1861, Reuben was a twenty-five-year-old miller who resided in Newport, Perry County; after enlisting as a private with Company D of the 2nd Pennsylvania Volunteers on April 20, he was honorably mustered out after completing his term of service; he then re-upped for a three-year tour of duty, mustering in as a first sergeant with Company H of the newly-formed 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry; also enrolling with him that same day were his twenty-three-year-old and twenty-one-year-old brothers, John A. Gardner and Jacob S. R. Gardner; John officially mustered in at Camp Curtin in Harrisburg on September 18 (the day before Reuben arrived), while Jacob officially mustered in on September 19; both joined their brother’s company, entering at their respective ranks of corporal and private, but Jacob’s tenure was a short one; sickened by typhoid fever in late December 1861, he died at the 47th Pennsylvania’s regimental hospital at Camp Griffin, near Langley, Virginia on January 8, 1862; his remains were later returned to Perry County for burial at the Old Newport Cemetery; soldiering on, Reuben and John were transported with their regiment by ship to Fort Taylor in Key West, Florida and subsequently sent to South Carolina with their regiment and other Union troops; shot in the head and thigh during the Battle of Pocotaligo, South Carolina on October 22, 1862, Reuben was treated at the Union Army’s hospital at Hilton Head, South Carolina for an extended period of time, and then returned to active duty with his regiment; meanwhile, John was assigned with H Company and the men from Companies D, F and K to garrison Fort Jefferson in Florida’s Dry Tortugas; both brothers then continued to work their way up the regiment’s ranks, with John promoted to corporal on September 18, 1864 and Reuben ultimately commissioned as a captain and given  command of Company H on February 16, 1865; both then returned home after honorably mustering out with the regiment in Charleston, South Carolina on Christmas Day, 1865; sometime around 1866 or 1867, Reuben and his wife migrated west, first to Elk River Station in Sherburne County, Minnesota and then to Stillwater, Washington County, before settling in the city of Minneapolis; through it all, he worked as a miller; Reuben and his family then relocated farther west, arriving in King County, Washington after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889; initially employed in the restaurant industry, Reuben later found work as a railroad conductor before prospecting for gold with son Edward in the western United States and British Columbia, Canada during the 1890s Gold Rush; employed as a U.S. Post Office clerk in charge of the money order and registry departments in Seattle from 1898 to 1902, Reuben died in Seattle at the age of sixty-eight on September 25, 1903 and was interred at that city’s Lakeview Cemetery; meanwhile, his brother John, who had resumed work as a fireman with the Pennsylvania Railroad after returning from the war, was widowed by his wife in 1872; after remarrying and welcoming the births of more children, he was severely injured on October 9, 1873 while working as a fireman on the Pacific Express for the Pennsylvania Railroad; unable to continue working as a fireman due to his amputated hand, he worked briefly as a railroad call messenger before launching his own transfer business in Harrisburg; after he was widowed by his ailing second wife, John was severely injured in a second accident in 1894 while loading his delivery wagon; still operating his business after the turn of the century, he remarried on January 3, 1900, but was widowed by his third wife when she died during a surgical procedure in 1911; he subsequently closed his business and relocated to the home of his daughter in the city of Reading, Berks County; four years later, he fell on an icy sidewalk and became bedfast; aged eighty and ailing from arteriosclerosis and lung congestion, he died at her home on February 20, 1918 and was buried at Reading’s Charles Evans Cemetery;

* Gethers, Bristor (Under-Cook, Company F): Born into slavery in South Carolina circa 1829, Bristor Gethers was married “by slave custom at Georgetown, S.C.” on the Pringle plantation in Georgetown sometime around 1847 to “Rachael Richardson” (alternate spelling “Rachel”); a field hand at the dawn of the Civil War, he was freed from chattel enslavement in 1862 by Union Army troops; he then enlisted as an “Under-Cook” with Company F of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry in Beaufort, South Carolina on October 5, 1862, and traveled with the regiment until October 4, 1865, when he was honorably discharged in Charleston, South Carolina upon completion of his three-year term of enlistment; at that point, he returned to Beaufort and resumed life with his wife and their son, Peter; a farmer, Bristor was ultimately disabled by ailments that were directly attributable to his Union Army tenure; awarded a U.S. Civil War Soldiers’ Pension, he lived out his days with his wife on Horse Island, South Carolina, and died on Horse Island, South Carolina on June 24 or 25, 1894; he was then laid to rest at a graveyard on Parris Island on June 26 of that same year;

* Gilbert, Edwin (Captain, Company F): A native of Northampton County and a carpenter residing in Catasauqua, Lehigh County at the dawn of the American Civil War, Edwin Gilbert enrolled as a corporal on August 21, 1861; after rising up through his regiment’s officer ranks, he was ultimately commissioned as a captain and placed in charge of his company on New Year’s Day, 1865, and then mustered out with his company in Charleston, South Carolina of Christmas of that same year; resuming his life with his wife and children in Lehigh County after the war, he continued to work as a carpenter; after suffering a stroke in late December 1893, he died on January 2, 1894 and was buried at the Fairview Cemetery in West Catasauqua;

Mrs. Caroline Bost and Martin L. Guth celebrated the anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday with fellow Grand Army of the Republic and ladies auxiliary members in February 1933 (public domain).

* Guth, Martin Luther (Corporal, Company K): A native of Lehigh County and son of a farmer, Martin L. Guth was a seventeen-year-old laborer and resident of Guthsville in Whitehall Township at the dawn of the American Civil War; after enrolling for military service on September 26, 1862, he was officially mustered in as a corporal; he continued to serve with his regiment until he was honorably mustered out on October 1, 1865, upon expiration of his term of service; at some point during that service, he broke his leg—an injury that did not heal properly and plagued him for the remainer of his life; after returning home to the Lehigh Valley, he found work again as a laborer; married in 1883, he became the father of four children, one of whom was born in New Mexico and another who was born in California; he had moved his family west in search of work in the mining industry; documented as a “prospector” or “miner” records created in Nevada during that period, he was also documented on voter registration rolls of Butte City in Glenn County, California in August 1892; by 1900, he was living separately from his wife, who was residing in Bandon, Coos County, Oregon with their two children while he was residing at the Veterans’ Home of California in Yount Township, Napa County, California; subsequently admitted to the Mountain Branch of the network of U.S. National Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Johnson City, Tennessee on February 11, 1912, his disabilities included an old compound fracture of his right leg with chronic ulceration, defective vision (right eye), chronic bronchitis, and arteriosclerosis; discharged on December 12, 1920, he was admitted to the U.S. National Soldiers’ Home in Leavenworth, Kansas on July 30, 1912, but discharged on September 29, 1913; by 1920, he was living alone on Fruitvale Avenue in the city of Oakland, California, but was remaining active with his local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic as he rose through the leadership ranks of chapter, state and national G.A.R. organizations; after a long, adventure-filled life, he died on October 11, 1935, at the age of ninety-one, at the veterans’ home in San Francisco and was interred at the San Francisco National Cemetery (also known as the Presidio Cemetery);

Lieutenant Charles A. Hackman, Company G, 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers, circa 1864 (public domain).

* Hackman, Charles Abraham and Martin Henry (First Lieutenant and Sergeant, Company G): Natives of Rittersville, Lehigh County, Charles and Martin Hackman began their work lives as apprentices, with Charles employed by a carpenter and Martin employed by master coachmaker Jacob Graffin; members of the local militia unit known as the Allen Rifles, they were among the earliest responders to President Abraham Lincoln’s call to defend the nation’s capital, following the fall of Fort Sumter in mid-April 1861; both enlisted as privates with Company I of the 1st Pennsylvania Volunteers on April 20 and were honorably mustered out in July after completing their service; Charles then re-upped for a three-year tour of duty, mustering in as a sergeant with Company G of the newly-formed 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry; he then spent most of his early service in Virginia; meanwhile, his younger brother, Martin H. Hackman, who was employed as a coach trimmer in Lehigh County, re-enlisted for his own second tour of duty, as a private with Charles’ company, on January 8, 1862; working their way up the ranks, Charles was commissioned as a first lieutenant on June 18, 1863, while Martin was promoted to sergeant on April 26, 1864; Charles was then breveted as a captain on November 30, 1864 after having mustered out on November 5; Martin was then honorably discharged on January 8, 1865; initially employed, post-war, with the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad’s train car facility in Reading, Berks County, Charles was promoted to car inspector at the company’s Philadelphia facility in December 1866; he subsequently married, but had no children and was widowed in 1904; remarried, he remained in Philadelphia until the early 1900s, when he relocated to Allentown; Martin, who worked as a bricklayer in Allentown, did have children after marrying, but he, too, was widowed; also remarried, he became a manager at a rolling mill; ailing with pneumonia in early 1917, Charles was eighty-six years old when he died in Allentown on January 17; he was buried at Allentown’s Union-West End Cemetery, while his brother Martin was buried at the Nisky Hill Cemetery in Bethlehem, following his death in Bethlehem from a cerebral hemorrhage on December 14, 1921;

* Junker, George (Captain, Company K): A German immigrant as a young adult, George Junker emigrated sometime around the early 1850s and settled in Allentown, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, where he found employment as a marble worker and tombstone carver, and where he also joined the Allen Infantry, one of his adopted hometown’s three militia units; responding to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s call for volunteers to defend the nation’s capital during the opening weeks of the American Civil War, George enlisted with his fellow Allen Infantrymen, honorably completed his Three Months’ Service, and promptly began his own recruitment of men for an “all-German company” for the newly-formed 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry; commissioned as a captain with the 47th Pennsylvania, he was placed in charge of his men who became known as Company K; mortally wounded by a Confederate rifle shot during the Battle of Pocotaligo, South Carolina on October 22, 1862, he died from his wounds the next day at the Union Army’s division hospital at Hilton Head, South Carolina; his remains were returned to his family in Hazleton, Luzerne County for reburial at the Vine Street Cemetery;

* Kern, Samuel (Private, Company D): A native of Perry County who was employed as a farmer in Bloomfield, Perry County when he enrolled for Civil War military service on August 20, 1861, Samuel Kern was wounded and captured by Confederate troops during the Battle of Pleasant Hill, Louisiana on April 9, 1864; marched to Camp Ford, near Tyler, Texas, the largest Confederate prison camp west of the Mississippi River, he was held there as a prisoner of war (POW) until he died from harsh treatment on June 12, 1864; buried somewhere on the grounds of that prison camp, his grave remains unidentified;

* Kosier, George (Captain, Company D): A native of Perry County and twenty-four-year-old carpenter residing in that county’s community of New Bloomfield at the dawn of the American Civil War, George Kosier became one of the earliest men from his county to respond to President Abraham Lincoln’s call for to defend the nation’s capital, following the fall of Fort-Sumter in mid-April 1861, when he enrolled for military service on April 20 as a corporal with Company D of the 2nd Pennsylvania Volunteers; honorably discharged in July after completing his Three Months’ Service, he re-enlisted as a first sergeant with Company D of the newly-formed 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry; joining him were his younger brothers, Jesse and William S. Kosier, aged nineteen and twenty-three, who were enrolled as privates with the same company; all three subsequently re-enlisted with their company at Fort Taylor in Key West, Florida in 1863; sadly, Jesse fell ill with pleurisy and died at the Union Army’s Field Hospital in Sandy Hook, Maryland on August 1864; initially buried at a cemetery in Weverton, Maryland, his remains were later exhumed and reinterred at the Antietam National Cemetery in Sharpsburg, Maryland; both George and William continued to serve with the regiment, with George continuing his rise up the ranks; commissioned as a captain, he was given command of Company D in early June 1865; both brothers were then honorably discharged with their regiment on Christmas Day, 1865; post-war, both men married and began families; William died in Pennsylvania sometime around 1879, but George went on to live a long full life; after settling in Ogle County, Illinois, where he was employed as a carpenter, he relocated with his family to Wright County, Iowa, where he built bridges; he died in Chicago on December 3, 1920 and was buried at that city’s Rosehill Cemetery;

Anna (Weiser) Leisenring (1851-1942) , circa 1914 (public domain).

* Leisenring, Annie (Weiser): The wife of Thomas B. Leisenring (Captain, Company G), Annie Leisenring was employed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a factory inspector after the American Civil War; she became well known through newspaper accounts of her inspection visits and also became widely respected for her efforts to improve child labor laws statewide;

* Lowrey, Thomas (Corporal, Company E): An Irish immigrant as a young adult, Thomas Lowrey emigrated sometime around the late 1840s or early 1850s and settled in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, where he found work as a miner, married and began a family; responding to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s call for volunteers to defend the nation’s capital during the opening weeks of the American Civil War, Thomas enlisted with Company E of the 47th Pennsylvania on September 16, 1861; after completing his three-year term of enlistment, he was honorably discharged in September 1864 and returned home to Pennsylvania, where he resumed work as a coal miner near Shenandoah, Schuylkill County, and where he resided with his wife and children; after witnessing the dawn of a new century, he died in Shenandoah on January 11, 1906;

This image of Julia (Kuenher) Minnich, circa 1860s, is being presented here through the generosity of Chris Sapp and his family, and is being used with Mr. Sapp’s permission. This image may not be reproduced, repurposed, or shared with other websites without the permission of Chris Sapp.

* Magill, Julia Ann (Kuehner Minnich): Widowed and the mother of a young son at the time that her husband, B Company’s Captain Edwin G. Minnich, was killed in battle during the American Civil War, Julia Ann (Kuehner) Minnich became a Union Army nurse at Harewood Hospital in Washington, D.C. during the war in order to keep a roof over her son’s head; she then spent the remainder of her life battling the U.S. Pension Bureau to receive and keep both the U.S. Civil War Widow’s Pension and U.S. Civil War Nurse’s Pension that she was entitled to under federal law; forced to go on working into her later years by poverty, she finally found work as a cook at a hotel in South Bethlehem; she died sometime after 1906;

* Menner, Edward W. (Second Lieutenant, Company E): A first-generation American who was a native of Easton, Northampton County, Edward Menner was a sixteen-year-old carpenter when he enrolled for Civil War military service on August 25, 1861; working his way up from private to second lieutenant before he was honorably discharged with his regiment in Charleston, South Carolina on Christmas Day, 1865, he was wounded in the left shoulder during the Battle of Cedar Creek, Virginia on October 19, 1864; after returning home to the Lehigh Valley, he secured employment as a hooker with the Bethlehem Iron Company (later known as Bethlehem Steel) on March 15, 1866; he married, begam a family and continued to work in the iron industry for much of his life; he died in Bethlehem on April 25, 1913 and was buried at that city’s Nisky Hill Cemetery;

* Miller, John Garber (Sergeant, Company D): A native of Ironville, Blair County, John G. Miller was a twenty-one-year-old laborer living in Duncannon, Perry County when he enrolled for Civil War military service on August 20, 1861; captured by Confederate troops during the Battle of Pleasant Hill, Louisiana on April 9, 1864 and marched to Camp Ford, near Tyler, Texas, the largest Confederate prison camp west of the Mississippi River, he was held there as a prisoner of war (POW) until he was released during a prisoner exchange on July 22, 1864; returned to active duty with his regiment after receiving medical treatment, he continued to serve until he was honorably discharged with the regiment in Charleston, South Carolina on December 25, 1865; after returning home, he married, began a family and relocated with his family to Philipsburg, Centre County, Pennsylvania, where he was employed as a teamster; returning to Blair County with his family, he resided with them in Logan Township before relocating with them again to Coalport, Clearfield County; suffering from heart disease, he died in Coalport on February 16, 1921 and was interred at the Coalport Cemetery;

Captain Theodore Mink, Company I, 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers (circa 1870s-1880s, courtesy of Julian Burley; used with permission).

* Mink, Theodore (Captain, Company I): A native of Allentown, Lehigh County who was apprenticed as a coachmaker and then tried his hand as a whaler and blacksmith prior to the American Civil War, Thedore Mink became one of the “First Defenders” who responded to President Abraham Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand volunteers to defend the nation’s capital after the fall of Fort Sumter in mid-April 1861; after honorably completing his Three Months’ Service in July, he re-enlisted on August 5 as a sergeant with Company I of the newly-formed 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry; after steadily working his way up through the ranks, he was commissioned as a captain and placed in charge of his company on May 22, 1865; he continued to serve with his regiment until it was mustered out on Christmas Day, 1865; following his return to Pennsylvania, he was hired as a laborer with a circus troupe operated by Mike Lipman before finding longtime employment in advertising and then as head of the circus wardrobe for the Forepaugh Circus before he was promoted to management with the circus; felled by pneumonia during late 1889, he died in Philadelphia on January 7, 1890 and was interred in Allentown’s Union-West End Cemetery;

* Newman, Edward (Private, Company H): A German immigrant who left his homeland sometime around 1920, Edward Newman chose to settle in Allentown, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, where he found work as a baker; after enlisting for Civil War military service in August 1862, he mustered in as a private with Company I of the 127th Pennsylvania Volunteers and fought in the Battle of Fredericksburg from December 11-15 of that year; honorably mustered out with his regiment in May 1863, he re-enlisted on October 23, 1863 for a second tour of duty—but as a private with a different regiment—Company H of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers; he continued to serve with the 47th Pennsylvania until he was officially mustered out in Charleston, South Carolina on Christmas Day, 1865, he returned to Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, where he worked briefly as a baker; suffering from rheumatism that developed while the 47th Pennsylvania was stationed near Cedar Creek, Virginia during the fall of 1864, he was admitted to the network of U.S. Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers at the Central Branch in Dayton, Montgomery County, Ohio on July 17, 1877; still unmarried and still living there in 1880, his health continued to decline; diagnosed with acute enteritis, he died there on January 22, 1886 and was buried at the Dayton National Cemetery;

Captain Daniel Oyster, Company C, 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers, circa 1864 (public domain).

* Oyster, Daniel (Captain, Company C): A native of Sunbury, Northumberland County who was employed as a machinist, Daniel Oyster became one of the earliest men from his county to respond to President Abraham Lincoln’s call to defend the nation’s capital, following the fall of Fort-Sumter in mid-April 1861, when he enrolled for Civil War military service on April 23 as a corporal with Company F of the 11th Pennsylvania Volunteers; honorably discharged in July after completing his Three Months’ Service, he re-enlisted as a first sergeant with Company C of the newly-formed 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers on August 19; his brother, John Oyster, subsequently followed him into the service, enrolling as a private with his company on November 20, 1863; after rising up through the ranks to become captain of his company, Daniel was shot in his left shoulder near Berryville, Virginia on September 5, 1864 and then shot in his right shoulder during the Battle of Cedar Creek on October 19; successfully treated by Union Army surgeons for both wounds, he was awarded a veteran’s furlough in order to continue his recuperation and returned home to Sunbury; he then returned to duty and was honorably discharged with his company on Christmas Day, 1865; post-discharge, he and his brother, John, returned home to Sunbury; Daniel continued to reside with their aging mother and was initially employed as a policeman, but was then forced by a war-related decline in his health to take less-taxing work as a railroad postal agent; his brother John, who was married, lived nearby and worked as a fireman, but died in Sunbury on April 20, 1899; employed as a bookkeeper after the turn of the century, Daniel never married and was ultimately admitted to the Southern Branch of the U.S. National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Hampton, Virginia, where he died on August 5, 1922—exactly sixty-one years to the day after the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry was founded; he was given a funeral with full military honors before being laid to rest in the officers’ section at the Arlington National Cemetery on August 11;

* Sauerwein, Thomas Franklin (First Sergeant, Company B): The son of a lock tender in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, Thomas Sauerwein was employed as a carpenter at the dawn of the American Civil War; following his enrollment for military service in Allentown, Lehigh County on August 20, 1861, he was officially mustered in as a private with Company B of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry; from that point on, he steadily worked his way up the ranks of the regiment, ultimately being promoted to first sergeant on New Year’s Day, 1865; following his honorable discharge with his company on Christmas Day of that same year, he returned home to the Lehigh Valley, where he found work as a carpenter, married and began a family; by 1880, he had moved his family west to Williamsport in Lycoming County, where he had found work as a machinist; employed as a leather roller with a tanning factory, he was promoted to a position as a leather finisher after the turn of the century, while his two sons worked as leather rollers in the same industry; he died in Williamsport on July 29, 1912 and was buried at the East Wildwood Cemetery in Loyalsock;

* Slayer, Joseph (Private, Company E; also known as “Dead Eye Dick” and “E. J. McMeeser”): A native of Philadelphia, Joseph Slayer was a nineteen-year-old miner residing in Willliams Township, Northampton County, Pennsylvania at the dawn of the American Civil War; after enrolling for military service in Easton, Northampton County on September 9, 1861, he was officially mustered in as a private with Company E of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers; he continued to serve with his company, re-enlisting as a private with Company E, under the name of Joseph Slayer, at Fort Jefferson in Florida’s Dry Tortugas on January 4, 1864; honorably mustered out with his company in Charleston, South Carolina on Christmas Day, 1865, he relocated to Zanesville, Ohio sometime after the war, where he joined the Grand Army of the Republic’s Hazlett Post No. 81; he may then have relocated briefly to St. Paul, Minnesota sometime around the 1870s or early 1880s, or may simply have had a child and grandchild living there, because newspaper reports of his death noted that he had been carrying a photograph of a toddler named Robert—a photo that had “To Grandpa” inscribed on it and indicated that the grandchild, Robert, was a resident of St. Paul in 1892; by the 1880s, Joseph had made it as far west as the Dakota Territory—but this was where his life’s journey took a strange twist; discarding the name he had used in the army (“Joseph Slayer”), he changed his name several times over the next several years, as if he were trying to shed his prior life and all of its associations; acquaintances he met in the southern part of the Dakota Territory during the early to mid-1880s knew him as “Dead Eye Dick” while others who met him after he had resettled in Bismarck, in the northern part of the Dakota Territory, knew him as “Eugene McMeeser” or “E. J. McMeeser” (alternate spelling: “McNeeser”); by the time that the federal government conducted its special census of Civil War veterans in June 1890, Joseph was so comfortable fusing parts of his old and new lives together that he was convincingly documented by an enumerator as “Eugene McMeeser,” a veteran who had served as a private with Company E of the 47th Pennsylvania Infantry from September 9, 1861 until January 11, 1866; in 1890, Joseph became a married man; documented as having rheumatism so severe that he was “at times confined at home,” he filed for a U.S. Civil War Pension from North Dakota on March 28, 1891—but he did so as “Joseph Slayer”—the name under which he had first enrolled for military service in Pennsylvania in 1861; ultimately awarded a pension—which would not have happened if federal officials had not been able to verify his identity and match it to his existing military service records, he was diagnosed with angina pectoris in 1904, but still managed to secure a U.S. patent for one of his inventions—a napkin holder; he died in Bismarck less than a month later, on January 12 or 13, 1905; found on the floor of his rented room, his death sparked a coroner’s inquest which revealed that he had been living under an assumed name; he was buried at Saint Mary’s Cemetery in Bismarck; the name “Joseph Slayer” was carved onto his military headstone;

* Snyder, Timothy (Corporal, Company C): A carpenter who was born in Rebuck, Northumberland County, Tim Snyder was employed as a carpenter and residing in the city of Sunbury in that county by the dawn of the American Civil War; after enlisting for military service as a private in August 1861, he was wounded twice in combat, once during the Battle of Pocotaligo, South Carolina (1862) and a second time, in the knee, during the Battle of Opequan, Virginia (1864), shortly after he had been promoted to the rank of corporal; he survived and returned to Pennsylvania, where he resumed work as a carpenter; after relocating to Schuylkill County, he settled in the community of Ashland; in 1870, he married Catharine Boyer and started a family with her; he continued to work as a carpenter in Schuylkill County until his untimely death in May 1889 and was laid to rest with military honors at the Brock Cemetery in Ashland; John Hartranft Snyder, his first son to survive infancy, grew up to become a co-founder of the Lavelle Telegraph and Telephone Company, while his second son to survive infancy, Timothy Grant Snyder, became a corporal in the United States Marine Corps during the Spanish-American War; stationed on the USS Buffalo as it visited Port Said, Egypt, he also served aboard Admiral George Dewey’s flagship, the USS Olympia, in 1899;

Drummer Boy William Williamson, 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers, Company A, circa 1863 (public domain).

* Williamson, William (Drummer, Company A): A farmer from Stockertown, Northampton County, William Williamson was documented by a mid-nineteenth-century federal census enumerator as an unmarried laborer who lived at the Easton home of Northampton County physician John Sandt, M.D.—an indication that William’s parents may have either died or were struggling so much financially during the 1850s and early 1860s that they had encouraged him to “leave the nest” and begin supporting himself, or had hired him out as an apprentice or indentured servant; like so many other young men from Northampton County, when President Abraham Lincoln issued his call for help to protect the nation’s capital from a likely invasion by Confederate States Army troops, he stepped forward, raised his hand, and stated the following:

I, William Williamson appointed a private in the Army of the United States, do solemnly swear, or affirm, that I will bear true allegiance to the United States of America, and that I will serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies or opposers whatsoever, and observe and obey the orders of the President of the United States, and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the rules and articles for the government of the Armies of the United States.

Later in life, William Williamson became a champion for an older woman who had been struggling to convince officials of the federal government that she was worthy enough to be awarded a U.S. Civil War Mother’s Pension, after her son had died in service to the nation as a Union Army soldier.

Post-war, William Williamson found work at a slate quarry, married, began a family in Belfast, Northampton County, and lived to witness the dawn of a new century. Following his death at the age of sixty in Plainfield Township on June 17, 1901, he was laid to rest at the Belfast Union Cemetery.

Sources:

1. “A Badge from Admiral Dewey and Schuylkill County” (announcements of Timothy Grant Snyder’s service on Admiral Dewey’s flagship). Reading, Pennsylvania: Reading Eagle: October 3, 1899 and November 21, 1899.
2. Baptismal, census, marriage, military, death, and burial records of the Snyder family. Pennsylvania, California, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Ohio, etc.: Snyder Family Archives, 1650-present; and in Historic Pennsylvania Church and Town Records (baptismal, marriage, death and burial records of various churches across Pennsylvania). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1776-1918.
3. Bates, Samuel P. History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-5, vol. 1. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: B. Singerly, State Printer, 1869.
4. James Crownover, James Downs and Samuel Kern, et. al., in Camp Ford Prison Records. Tyler, Texas: The Smith County Historical Society, 1864.
5. Civil War Muster Rolls, 1861-1866 (47th Pennsylvania Infantry). Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Archives.
6. Civil War Veterans’ Card File, 1861-1866 (47th Pennsylvania Infantry). Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Archives.
7. Registers of Deaths of Volunteers, U.S. Army; Admissions Ledgers, U.S. National Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers; federal burial ledgers, and national cemetery interment control forms, 1861-1935. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Office of the Adjutant General (Record Group 94), U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
8. Schmidt, Lewis. A Civil War History of the 47th Regiment of Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers. Allentown, Pennsylvania: Self-published, 1986.
9. U.S. Census Records, 1830-1930. Washington, D.C.: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
10. U.S. Civil War Pension Records, 1862-1935. Washington, D.C.: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

https://47thpennsylvaniavolunteers.com/2024/09/01/the-backbones-of-a-nation-the-laborers-who-enlisted-with-the-47th-pennsylvania-volunteer-infantry/

#47thPennsylvania #47thPennsylvaniaInfantry #47thPennsylvaniaRegiment #47thPennsylvaniaVolunteers #47thRegimentPennsylvania #AlleghenyCounty #Allentown #America #AmericanCivilWar #AmericanHistory #ArlingtonNationalCemetery #Army #Ashland #Baker #Beaufort #BerksCounty #Bethlehem #Bismarck #BlackHistory #Blacksmith #Blain #BlairCounty #Boatman #bricklayer #Brookville #Butcher #Cabinetmaker #California #CampFord #canal #CarbonCounty #Carpenter #Catasauqua #CentreCounty #CharlesEvansCemetery #Charleston #Chicago #Cigarmaker #Circus #CivilWar #ClearfieldCounty #coachTrimmer #coachmaker #Coalport #CommonwealthOfPennsylvania #DakotaTerritory #Dayton #Duncannon #Easton #Factory #Farmer #fireman #firemen #FirstDefenders #FloridaAndSouthCarolina #ForepaughCircus #FortJefferson #FortTaylor #FruitvaleAvenue #Germany #goldProspecting #GoldRush #Hampton #Harrisburg #HiltonHead #History #Illinois #Immigrants #Immigration #Infantry #inspector #Iowa #Ireland #Irish #Iron #JeffersonCounty #JohnsonCity #Kansas #KeyWest #LaborDay #LaborDayWeekend #Laborers #Leavenworth #LehighCounty #LehighValley #lockTender #Louisiana #LuzerneCounty #LycomingCounty #Machinist #Maryland #Masons #Miner #Minnesota #NapaValley #Nebraska #Nevada #NewJersey #NewMexico #NorthDakota #NorthamptonCounty #NorthumberlandCounty #Nurses #Oakland #Ohio #Oregon #PacificExpress #PennsylvaniaHistory #PennsylvaniaInTheCivilWar #PennsylvaniaRailroad #PerryCounty #Philadelphia #Phillipsburg #Pittsburgh #Pocotaligo #POW #prisonerOfWar #Quarry #railroad #ReadingRailroad #Rittersville #Robesonia #rollingMill #SanFrancisco #SchuylkillCounty #Seattle #Shenandoah #ShenandoahValley #Slavery #SouthCarolina #StPaul #Sunbury #tanner #tannery #Teamsters #Tennessee #Texas #TheUnionArmy #Tyler #USMilitaryAndTheUnionArmy #USPostOffice #veteran #VeteranVolunteers #veterans #Virginia #Washington #WestwardMigration #Whaler #Williamsport #Zanesville

Frying on Friday: a record-breaking 104° for Billings, and more record heat in other parts of Montana and Wyoming! Relief will arrive next week, though!

#Montana #Billings #Q2 #KTVQ #MTN #Wyoming #Baker #Livingston #MilesCity #Sheridan #heat #hot #frying #Friday #weather #wx #mtwx #wywx

Tom Baker says he avoids other Doctor Who stars out of ‘contempt’ | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/doctor-who-tom-baker-david-tennant-b2450572.html

#Baker
#TomBaker
#DoctorWho
#OtherDoctors
#4thDoctor
#Tennant
#DavidTennent
#Davies
#RussellTDavies
#Chibnall

Brexit should have needed 60% vote in favour, says Tory Brexiteer minister | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-referendum-supermajority-vote-tory-baker-b2434582.html

#Brexit
#BrexitReferendum
#ToryBrexiteer
#Tory
#Baker

Fell Fine Bakers: the thread about Robert McVitie, Alexander Grant and their enduringly popular biscuits

Edinburgh’s industrial heritage is often overshadowed both by the prominence of law, education and medicine in the city and the dominance of its western neighbour (I’m talking about you, Glasgow!) However there were some sectors where Edinburgh became a national powerhouse. Where Dundee is renowned as the City of Jute, Jam and Journalism it is more commonly forgotten than remembered that Edinburgh had Beer, Books and… Biscuits! Such was the significance of the baking industry that in 1939 three of the UK’s four largest biscuit producers had their origins in Edinburgh and Leith, producing between them over 79,000 tons of biscuits per annum. This was 43% of the total output of members of the National Association of Biscuit Manufacturers (it should be noted that these bakers all had multiple factories around the UK, and Edinburgh was not itself producing 43% of all biscuits!).

In Edinburgh itself, the largest biscuit bakery was McVitie & Price. This company started out way back in 1830 when Dumfries baker Robert McVitie (senior) came to the city to join his father. The latter had had inherited property here from his brother and together they opened a bakery at 129 Rose Street (now an Indian restaurant, where many years ago I had the hottest curry of my life!) When Robert married Catherine Gairns in 1844 the money she brought allowed the business to expand. More salubrious premises at 23 Queensferry Street were acquired and Robert took a keen interest in European baking trends. He introduced the Viennese loaf to Scotland and styled the family shop “Boulangerie Francaise et Viennoise“. Robert retired in 1884 at 75 and his son Robert (junior) took over and split the retail and baking operations apart, moving the latter to larger premises at 8-9 Merchant Street.

One day in 1887 a young man by the name of Alexander Grant, a baker from Forres, walked into McVitie’s shop on Queensferry Street looking for a job. Robert (junior) was behind the counter and told him there were none going. “It’s a pity“, Grant remarked, “for I’m a fell fine baker.” Turning to leave, he picked up a scone from a display, examined it and declared “well, onyways, ye canna mak scones in Edinburgh“. McVitie hired him on the spot and it was as well that he did as Grant proved to be the golden goose that would lay the Digestive biscuit in 1891, making McVities a household name and a fortune in the process.

Grant kept the precise recipe of his biscuit secret, personally supervising the mixing machine room. Machines would lie idle if he was away in London on business, awaiting his return by train. His elder daughter Elizabeth would later take over custodianship of the secret recipe to ensure that mixing and baking could go on constantly.

Robert McVitie proved to have a skill for hiring the right people. One such hire, George Andrews Brown, was sent to establish a sales branch in London were he found the company’s large Scotch biscuits didn’t sell and that their version of the Rich Tea was too hard for southern tastes. He fed this back to Edinburgh, where Grant developed the smaller, crisper, modern version of this biscuit in response. Brown is also credited with the idea of the filled, cream sandwich biscuit: think of him and dunk his memory the next time you enjoy a Bourbon or Custard Cream. In 1888 McVitie engaged a commercial traveller from Cadbury’s – Charles Price – on the basis that if his sales proved him he would be made a partner in the firm. Price sold the biscuits and McVitie was true to his word, the company becoming McVitie & Price. Charles Price joined at a pivotal moment when the company was looking to expand and had just bought land on Stewart Terrace in Gorgie (which had only been incorporated into Edinburgh a few years earlier in 1882) to build a new industrial bakery, the St. Andrew’s Biscuit Factory.

Disaster struck in 1894 when a fire completely destroyed the new factory, causing £25,000 (c. £2.6M in 2023) of damage. The fire was discovered by Price, working late.Firemaster Wilkins, all available men and two steam fire engines were soon on the scene, but could not save the factory.

This setback might have caused lesser men to crumble, but McVitie, Price and Grant stepped up to the challenge and would turn the adversity into an opportunity. They found that there was no spare factory space in Edinburgh – or even in Scotland – to rent and had to go as far away as Malton in Yorkshire to set up a temporary works. Grant was put in charge of this operation and proved himself a capable manager. The St. Andrew’s Works arose again from the ashes, much enlarged and completely modernised. It was now the largest and newest biscuit factory in the country, capable of baking 1 ton of biscuits, per oven, per day.

The company could hardly keep up with demand. Their trade in London, secured by George Andrews Brown, grew ten-fold between 1896 and 1900; from £10,000 to £100,000 a year. It made no commercial sense to transport all these biscuits to the southern metropolis from Edinburgh and so an even bigger new factory was built in Harlesden in London. Opening in 1902, the Edinburgh Biscuit Works employed 2,000 workers and had an output three times that of the St. Andrew’s works. Grant took an obsessive approach to the establishment of the operation in London, travelling down every other day by train for the first 3 months of business to personally oversee the mixing of all biscuit doughs, returning to Edinburgh on the overnight train to keep his other eye on mixing there too. To ensure nobody else could bake biscuits behind his back he took the only copies of the biscuit-cutting dies with him, back and forth between Edinburgh and London. This tireless approach to work was very much in Grant’s nature. He worked a 6 day, 60 hour week, read every trade journal cover-to-cover, and still found time to study Food Chemistry at the Heriot-Watt College.

Another key to the success and meteoric rise of the company was royal patronage. This began in 1893 at the wedding of the future King George V and Queen Mary, when Queen Victoria’s personal confectioner was overwhelmed by demand and so the wedding cakes were contracted out. McVitie & Price were the only Scottish firm to get one of the five prestigious cake orders and rose to the occasion, producing a gigantic cake standing 6′ 4″ tall (1.93m), 8′ (2.43m) in circumference at the base, weighing 466lbs (211kg) and costing 140 guineas (c. £15.5k in 2023). The cake was exhibited for 2 days in Edinburgh and fourteen thousand people queued to see it before it was shipped to London, . This “major work of baking and confection art” was declared by Princess Mary to be the stand out of the lot.

This secured a Royal Warrant of Appointment for McVitie & Price and established them as the go-to bakers of royal wedding, anniversary and christening cakes for the best part of the next 65 years; they produced wedding cakes for both the future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. In accordance with an old tradition, the top tiers of the wedding cakes were kept and sent back to McVitie’s for redecoration as the christening cakes for the first children of the union.

Robert McVitie died aged only 56 in 1910. The company was converted to a Limited structure as McVitie & Price Ltd, even though the latter partner had officially retired in 1906 when he took up the seat of Edinburgh Central in the House of Commons as Liberal Party MP. The new board sensibly promoted Alexander Grant to the positions of both Chairman and Managing Director, cementing his position as the foremost industrial baker of his age. In 1916, after nearly dying from double pneumonia, he convinced the National Bank of Scotland to back him in a buyout of the company, which he continued to run with the single-minded determination for which he was renowned, right up until his death in 1937.

It was the pressure of overwork that nearly killed grant during WW1 – the company had a huge government contract to bake iron ration biscuits for the men in the trenches. The factories in Edinburgh and London could not cope with this demand and so a new operation was started in Stockport, Manchester. To help ease the strain, he brought his son (Robert McVitie Grant) and his son-in-law (Hector Laing senior) into top level positions in the company, but not before they worked their way up from the bottom at Grant’s insistence: they started out stoking ovens on the night shift so that they would be familiar with every aspect of the business. On his wedding day, Hector Laing’s father-in-law-to-be insisted he came into work in the morning before being officially passed as fit to wed his daughter. It was worth it though, as Grant’s nepotism made Laing a very wealthy man indeed.

In 1928, McVitie & Price unleashed the Jaffa Cake (“something new in biscuits“) onto the market. Surprisingly, it wasn’t much of a success – at least not yet.

Grant personally managed all details of his company from top to bottom. As well as being obsessive about the biscuit mixes and quality he took a keen interest in the sales side, appointing (and firing) all the salesmen personally. But he was also a sensible delegator. When Lord Thomas Horder, the royal physician, complained to him in 1933 that he couldn’t get Scandinavian rye crispbreads in the UK, Grant put his son to the task who came up with MacVita cracker.

He was a close friend and patron of his fellow Morayshire loon, Labour politician Ramsay MacDonald. He made campaign contributions to him and in 1924 caused a political scandal in the wrong sorts of papers by donating a Rolls Royce to the new PM for his personal use, plus 30,000 McVities shares to pay for its upkeep. This criticism stung Grant. In his eyes he was giving his friend – who was not in himself a wealthy man – a gift from his own pocket, and asking nothing in return, thus sparing the nation the expense of official transport. His receipt of the heredity Baronetcy of Forres 1924 was used to claim he had bought political favour. In reality, he received the honour for his efforts to help establish the National Library of Scotland. He donated £100,000 (c. £5M in 2023) towards this establishment, but did so by handing over a blank cheque for the Chairman of the National Library Committee to fill in as he saw fit, instructing his banker to make sure it was paid without question. A further £100,000 followed in the 1930s to help fund the construction of the building on George IV Bridge in Edinburgh.)

Always a generous man, pressed from the mould of the philanthropic Victorian industrialist, the scandal didn’t put Grant off of benefaction. In his home town of Forres, he gifted towards renovation of the Parish Church, a new fire engine and the public park, named Grant Park in his honour. He donated a golf course to Lossiemouth and paid for the reconstruction of Nairn public baths. His last act of generosity was £10,000 (c. £570k in 2023) in 1937 to provide for a 4,000 piece silver & crystalware banqueting set, hand made by Scottish artisans, for the Palace of Holyroodhouse. After attending the coronation of King George Vi and Queen Elizabeth in May 1937, Grant fell ill once again with pneumonia and died at home in Edinburgh on May 21st.

The company passed to his son, Robert McVitie Grant, who would form a close working relationship with Glasgow competitors Macfarlane, Lang & Co. in the 1940s in the spirit of the national wartime economy. This economy saw the product line slashed from 370 different types of cakes and biscuits to just 10 by 1945 (thus removing the Jaffa Cake from shelves for almost 20 years). Robert died suddenly in 1948 and largely as a result of this the two companies merged to form United Biscuits, an industrial giant. McVities were the senior partner in the merger and dominated the new corporate structure, although it was alternately run from factories in Edinburgh, Manchester and London. The company gave their individual factories relative commercial freedom (to the point in having their own specific recipes for the same biscuits, thus often competing with eachother). But this allowed the St. Andrew’s works in Edinburgh under Morton Young to take the initiative and reintroduce the Jaffa Cake, which by the mid-1950s was being churned out in Gorgie at the rate of 10,000 tins a day!

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

The thread about the humble Scotch Pie; what makes it Scotch, what it is not, its history and a surprising aficionado

This thread was originally written and published in May 2023.

The humble Scotch Pie. Affordable. Digestible. Lukewarm. Greasy. Crunchy. Legendary.

So what is a Scotch Pie? You might know what one looks and tastes like, but what defines it and how did it come to be? Why does it need to be called Scotch to differentiate it from other species of pie?

If one flicks to their Statutory Instruments of UK Law, to The Meat Pie and Sausage Roll Regulations (1967), they will find a legal definition in Part I (Preliminary), under section 2 (Interpretation).

‘Scottish pie’ means a meat pie composed of a shallow cylindrical pastry case not exceeding 5 inches in diameter containing minced beef or minced mutton, (or a mixture), cereal, water, salt and seasonings, and not containing any jelly.

Scotch Pie definition per the Meat Pie and Sausage Roll Regulations (1967).

These regulations elaborate that the expression “Scottish Pie” refers to a “Scotch Pie”. The regulations account for a different pie tradition in Scotland vs. England or Wales. Scotch Pies are allowed different meat (lower) and fat (higher) ratio than non-Scottish pies. For a pre-cooked Scotch Pie, it has to be no less than 20% meat overall, and there is a specific Scotch Pie formula used to calculate it.

Regulations don’t define the pastry, but it’s nearly always a thin, hot-water crust pastry made with lard. Seasonings are not specified, but is always heavy on white pepper and each baker or butcher will have their own specific mix, with nutmeg usually in there too.

Some pictures of so-called “Scotch Pies” that you will find in online recipes feature a very chunky minced meat filling, the sort supermarkets sell. These aren’t Scotch Pies – where the mince should be very finely chopped and mixed with a bit of rusk or flour so that it forms a sort of tasty, homogeneous meat blob when cooked – these other pies have the filling of what is called a “Mince Round”, a much wider, shallow pie, served in slices.

The regulations so say a Scotch pie must be cylindrical and how wide it is, but a few centuries of tradition says it is a very shallow pie and that the pastry should be *very* thin, and self supporting. This tall BBC / Paul Hollywood effort has been made with a thick pastry suitable for a pork pie, and raised tall in the same manner on a dolly, which as a result has to be cooked with a supporting wall of greaseproof paper tied with string and is absolutely not a Scotch Pie. Frankly both Paul and the BBC should know better and should pull the recipe as a national slander.

The Scotch Pie pastry lid should be sunk lower than the edges, crimping of fluting is not traditional in many places, but some bakers will do it. That’s the thing about pies, much like morning rolls, they vary and are one of the few places were a Scottish baking tradition is still expressed with infinite regional variety. A hole in the lid is not obligatory, but again is done some places or it isn’t done in others. Some say it’s to pour gravy or sauce in. Dundee lore is that a 2 hole “Peh” also has onions in the mix (but legally – with onions in there – it ain’t a Scotch Peh!).

The Dundonian penchant for onions in their pies (or their Bridies, a totally different, hand-held, meat-filled baked good), gives rise to the shibboleth “Twa pehs, a plen ane an an ingin ane an a“, where the last 6 words are rolled into a single, rapid, tongue-twisting sound that goes “aningininanaw”.

Scotch Pies have usually avoided politics. However in 1991, Baroness Trumpington, then Agriculture Minister, pledged to “defend [this] British delicacy from Brussels bureaucrats“, in an argument with the EC over regulations around definition of uncooked mince content.

While always a popular staple of those attending football matches or with hangovers, it took a determined, post-BSE crisis effort in the late 90s to begin to rehabilitate the pie. The Langholm Pie Club formed in 1996, to “search for the perfect Scotch pie”. In 1999, Alan Stuart, a traditional butcher and baker in Buckhaven, formed the Scotch Pie Club, to raise the profile of the pie. The club was “modelled on the Sausage Appreciation Society” (Matron!). Stuart and the Club have been credited with successfully rehabilitating the Scotch Pie as not just a lowest common denominator product, but something that exemplifies the craft of traditional and regional Scottish butchery and bakery. The club’s slogan is Say Aye Tae a Pie and you can buy it on a pin badge from ebay. Their main event is the annual Scotch Pie World Championship, which was first run in 1999 when it was won by John Davies of Bo’ness, whose family bakery had been making and selling Scotch Pies for 20 years. Stuarts of Buckhaven themselves won it in 2007.

In 2000, Maurice Irvine from Ayrshire penned “Tae a Pie” in the best spirit of the other Ayrshire bard, to toast its immortal memory:

Whether yer naked or filled wi beans
The price is aye within a bodie’s means
Your crust is firm but not too hard
It’s just the right balance of flour, salt and lard
The meat in the middle is spicy and braw
There’s naithing tae beat it, naithin at ah!
You’re as Scottish as Bruce but you’ll never die
Lads and Lassies, I gie ye
The Pie

A Toast tae the Pie, by Maurice Irvine, from Ayrshire

You’ll note that I’ve been using the term “Scotch Pie” consistently – as that’s how it’s defined, but of course in Scotland it’s usually just “a” Pie (or a Peh if you’re Dundonian). Calling it “Scotch” stems from the post-war legal definitions and food labelling requirements and the introduction of many other sorts of pies into the Scottish marketplace. But if you go into a traditional baker or butcher and order yourself “a Pie”, you’ll get served a Scotch Pie.

The fact Scotch Pies are not referred to as such in any older sources makes it relatively hard to research – if you just search for “pie” it’s not specific enough. But with some perseverance it’s possible to trace our modern Scotch Pie as evolving from the traditional “Penny Mutton Pie” of the late 18th and early 19th century. These were small, individual pies sold warm by bakers or butchers, particularly on market days or holidays, at an affordable price. Note that at this time, such pies in Scotland were always mutton, the predominant day-to-day meat eaten by most people. Beef was always more of a luxury and didn’t begin creeping into the Scotch Pie mix until the middle of the 20th century, and didn’t really displace mutton until the 1950s and 60s as the former became cheaper and the latter’s staple position on the Scottish dinner plate waned.

The grand doyenne of Scottish culinary writing – F. Marian Mcneill – wrote of ” our most distinctive Scottish pie, the small mutton pie” in 1937 in a piece for the Scotsman. She describes a pie from the memoirs of James Stuart MP, who had schooled at Madras College in St. Andrews and gone to university there too, in the 1850s and 60s. It was of “mutton minced to the smallest consistency, and was made up in a standing crust, strong enough to contain the gravy… there were no lumps of fat or grease in them. They always arrived piping hot“. These pies, Stuart fondly recalled, were made and sold by “Mrs Gillespie, the pie-wife of St. Andrews” and still made his mouth water decades later just thinking about them.

McNeill gives us a definitive recipe I can find – writing for the Scotsman in 1937 – stating that small mutton pies were “as popular in 18th century Edinburgh as [they are] today” and that she did not know whether Glasgow’s claim to be “it’s true home” was correct. I don’t think any one place could ever claim to be the birthplace of the Scotch Pie – they were clearly a common and widespread product across the centre and east of the country in the late 18th century.

A story in the Brechin Advertiser in 1890 implies the existence of a Penny Mutton Pie shop run by baker Willie Smith, in the 1820s, to which local boys flocked as hawkers, being paid in pies; 1 pie given per dozen sold. The John O’ Groats Journal in 1840 mentions Penny Mutton Pies. On New Year’s Day 1850, the Barony Workhouse in Glasgow announced in the papers that inmates “old and young, sane and insane” would be “made happy with a hot mutton pie each“. In 1853 the occasion of the coming of age of William Kerr, 9th Marquess of Lothian, was celebrated in Newbattle by a parade of miners and mining bands, with children “regaled with mutton pies, the boys engaged in the collieries being provided with pies of larger size“. In 1865, I find what is the earliest overt advert for a Penny Mutton Pie that I have come across, with A. Reid at the “Top of the Murraygate and Seagate” in Dundee offering them at 1d or 2d each under the slogan “If you want a good Mutton Pie, try A. Reid’s“. In October 1892, Mr A. Gordon of Gordon St., Huntly, announced the start of the “Hot mutton pie supply for the season”, clearly suggesting that in some places they may have been a seasonal product.

Such mutton pies – be they called Small, Scots or Penny – would be recognisable to us today but probably offered much more variety of style and content than we are now used to. The first actual glimpse we get of one is in a Dundee Courier cartoon of 1889 for a column entitled “Impressions of Dundee“, which tells a humorous story of a homesick Dundonian coming across a man eating a Dundee mutton pie in the British Library in London.

Pie Advertising is common in Scottish newspapers in the first half of the 20th century, but usually just a few lines of text in the classified pages. However in 1924, Hay’s of Murraygate, Dundee (legendary for its association with the genesis of the Macaroni Pie) took out a particularly fancy advert for “The Big Pie” at 1/6d as a “Sure Favourite for the Weekend“. From the image it appears to be a giant Scotch pie (which of course, modern definition wouldn’t allow to be called a Scotch Pie!)

It was around this time that a Mr Stoddart, a baker in the Ayrshire town of Cumnock, came up with the sweet-filled version of the Scotch pie – the appropriately named “Cumnock Tart” – which is a regular Scotch Pie case but with a stewed apple or rhubarb filling, and a glaze of the same fruit. Cumnock Tarts sold in actual Cumnock appear to have evolved into a more oval-shape, with a crimped edge, but the “fruit Scotch pie” form is the more common.

Back to mutton pies though. Victor MacClure, writing in “Scotland’s Inner Man“, a 1935 food and cookery history, recorded that in Glasgow they were known as “Tupenny Struggles” and that hot gravy was poured in the hole in the pie lid when sold and served. Catherine Brown, writing in “Scottish Regional Recipes” in 1983, records an establishment of yore run by a character called Grannie Black in Glasgow’s Candleriggs that was renowned for its “Tupenny Mutton Pies“. A bar of that name existed from the 1820s until it was demolished relatively recently.

Aside from the sweetened version, the basic Scotch Pie case is infinitely flexible as a filling containment and delivery system. Clarks of Dundee for instance offer: Scotch, Scotch with Beans, Scotch with Onion, Steak & Gravy, Bean & Tattie (a Scotch Pie, but with the top lid replaced by a layer of mashed potato and baked beans, to give a whole meal in a pie), Bolognese, Chicken Curry, Korma, Tikka, Balti and Chicken and Ham. The lasagne pies of Argo’s in Kirkwall are legendary, and I’ve been advised that a Bovril pie is too. And of course, take off the lid and fill the pie with macaroni cheese, and you get the Macaroni pie, which as far as I can trace was first sold by Hays of Dundee in 1920 (click the link for the thread about that particular pie, and pasta in general in traditional Scottish cuisine).

Scotch Pies have travelled the world, put down roots and evolved into national pies of their own (or, at least some of it) and have a reasonable claim to explain why similar small, hand-held meat pies have a cult status in Australian and New Zealand cuisine. You see in the late 1850s, an “energetic young Scotchman with only a few pounds in the way of capital“, by the name of James Seves Hosie, opened a pie shop on Bourke Street in Melbourne, where he sold “thrupenny mutton pies”. James, a bootmaker to trade, was born in Fife in 1831 but grew up in Leith. He arrived in Melbourne in 1853 from the ship Koh-I-Noor.

Hosie’s father started a bakery in Melbourne on Bourke Street, and after working as a bootmaker in the Australian gold fields, the young James settled down in an establishment of his own nearby and made a fortune from his pies. And what was the name of Hosie’s establishment? Why it was The Scotch Pie Shop! And it’s recorded in metal in the penny tokens he issued due to a shortage of small coinage in circulation. In later life,his financial success on the back of Scotch Pies allowed him to build “a pretty bijou theatre… a luxurious Turkish bathing establishment… a couple of gigantic hotels and attained the dignity of Mayor“. He died in 1889, leaving £10,000 to a Melbourne Hospital.

While this is not the earliest use of the term “Scotch Pie” it is the first definitive use of it I can find to describe a small, penny, mutton pie of Scottish heritage: even if it was thousands of miles from Scotland.

There is a second type of pie referred to as “Scotch”. There was no common definition of what sort of pie this was, but its characteristic was it was some sort of “make do” pie to spin out what you had and it’s important to note that it was not specifically a Scottish thing. Rather, in this case “Scotch” was a reference to the perceived meanness and/or thriftiness of Scots.

A 1908 recipe by Olive Green in “How to Cook Fish” has a Scotch Pie being a mackerel pie with layers of sliced potato instead of pastry. In 1909 by Eleanor L. Jenkinson in “The Ocklye Cookery Book” it’s a pie of boiled calf’s head and eggs. In 1914 in the Huntly Express, it’s a fruit-less fruit pie made using a thin layer of jam. In the Sheffield Daily Telegraph in 1928 it’s a pie of grouse, mushroom and boiled eggs. In 1931’s Leicester Chronicle, it’s sheep’s heart, bacon and boiled eggs with mashed potato on top. In 1940’s “Cookery Corner” in the Daily Mirror, a Scotch Pie was a wartime economy recipe made of a tin of tomato soup, chopped onion and minced beef in pastry. In 1949, during the grim times of post-war austerity, the Sunday Mail in Glasgow gives a frugal and rather desperate recipe for “Scotch Pie” to serve 4 that is lentils, onions and carrots in a thin “gravy” made of dripping and the water in which the lentils were cooked, covered in a layer of mashed potato and swede and baked. Woolton pie, but worse! As late as 1954, a recipe in the “Kitchen Encyclopaedia” by the Anglo-American cookery writer Countess Morphy (her pen name, she wasn’t a countess or called Morphy!) gives an odd-sounding recipe of mutton suet, calf’s feet, apples, currants and various sweet flavourings!

But by the 1950s, the tide was turning in terms of the naming of a Scotch Pie, as an increasingly less localised and more mechanised baking industry found itself needing more specific definitions and machinery. In 1949 Waddell of Wishaw, bakers engineers, were advertising an electric pie machine for forming “Scotch Pie shells”. In 1969, Clyde-Enco Ltd advertised the “Clyde-Enco Clean Depositor” for “depositing Scotch Pie meat” in the case. Both of these were Scottish companies, serving the Scottish pie-baking industry, referring to them as Scotch Pies. A somewhat surprising fan of the Scotch Pie, and an early use (outwith Australia) calling a Scotch Pie a Scotch Pie is revealed in a September 1963 gossip column by Rex North in the Daily Mirror. None other than Alfred Hitchcock, who had told Rex he had “finally got a recipe” for such pies that was “to his satisfaction”, thus solving a “personal mystery”. One can only imagine Hitchcock picked up his pie habit filming The 39 Steps in Scotland in the 1930s and again in the 1950s.

There is a third broad grouping of “Scotch Pies” beyond the Penny Mutton and the Austerity Pies covered above. This type of Scotch Pie is a much older form with its own history and is an interesting tangent to our story. And these Scotch Pies were huge pies, defined both by their size and that they could be filled with anything and everything! Mention of such pies is made by Samuel Johnson, writing of his encounters with Scottish fayre in the 18th c. on his travels. He describes a “Scotch Pie” as a seasonal, celebratory pie:

Which contains a heterogeneous mass of fish, flesh and fowl, and almost every other species of edible substance, and so ample are its dimensions that more than one whole goose is frequently encrusted within its walls

Samuel Johnson, on the subject of “Scotch” Pies

This “everything pie” results in “Scotch Pie” being a derisory metaphor used in 1835 to describe the cabinet of the new Prime Minister, Viscount Melbourne, as a “Scotch Pie Cabinet” on account of its varied contents and (from the point of view of the author), distasteful contents. However the “Scotch Pie” that Johnson saw is more than likely what was called a Bride’s Pie or Bride Pie and was a vestige of an an ancient European wedding tradition going back to medieval times, but which had largely died out by the later Elizabethan era. These Bride Pies – also called Subtleties or Extraordinary Pies – were huge, multi-tiered pies, the origin of the multi-tiered wedding cake. Intricate moulds were used to bake the structural (and inedible) pie cases

The pies were “flamboyantly inedible” and were filled with anything and everything – alive and dead. Edible parts included cockscombs, sweetbreads, testicles, kidneys, prawns, oysters, cockles, bats, frogs and blackbirds. Yes, these pies are where you get the nursery rhyme of “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie”. However such birds were often alive, placed inside a hollow pie shell, so that when they were cut open they would fly or jump out in a stunning (or disastrous) display.

Samuel Pepys, writing in the mid-late 17th century, refers to a bride pie at the wedding of Sir William Batten, 3 pies, nested one within the other, but they were falling out of fashion with the upper classes by this time. They persisted in rural Scotland into the early 19th century, particularly the lowlands, forming their own tradition of wedding pies related to the “Penny Wedding” or “Penny Bridal” custom, which is recorded in Scotland back into the 16th century. In the Scottish romantic revival of the 18th and early 19th century, the Penny Wedding was a frequent subject. Sir David Wilkie’s 1818 painting gives you an idea of what they were like.

Guests paid a penny to attend, which covered any costs for the married couple and also provided a financial gift to help set the married couple up. A suitable barn or hall was the venue. Musicians and entertainment provided itself from amongst the community and it was the responsibility of the bridal family to provide the food: a Bride Pie. And what do we see in the background of Wilkie’s painting? Why, it’s a great, big bride pie!

And in David Allan’s “Scottish Penny Wedding” of 1795? Why if it isn’t a great big bride pie again…

It was the custom that the whole community, were able, would provide what content for the pie that they could, which is why it came to contain everything and anything, from farm meat to game to fish to eggs to dairy. The laird or tacksman would (if they were on good terms) provide joints for it too. All guests expected to – and were obliged to – be served some of this giant pie. By the 1860s, “penny weddings” and pies were being written of in the past tense, but are recorded both in Borders and Aberdeenshire publications. By the 1890s they are described as being “vanished“.

We should note that the phrase “penny wedding” must be post-Union, as it refers to an amount equivalent to the English/British penny, historically the tradition was to pay a Scots shilling – which was of equivalent value. So while although these Bride’s Pies were not Scotch Pies, almost certainly they are what Johnson was referring to as his Scotch Pie. And what does the word Bride’s Pie give us? It gives us Bridie, the other Scottish baked good that’s filled with minced meat. The semi-circular shape of the Bridie is reputed to resemble a horse shoe, and there are certainly references to it originally being something prepared and served for holidays and separations. But Bridies will have to wait for another day for their own thread.

There was no fixed recipe for a Bride’s Pie on account of its very “pot luck” nature, but one is given by Margaret Dods (pen name of Chirstian Johnston) in the 1826 Scottish cook book “The Cook and Housewife’s Manual”. It’s the very same recipe as the Countess Morphy gives us in 1954 that we saw earlier in this post! Johnston, who was sponsored by Walter Scott, gives us something much more important than a recipe here though, she provides us a definitive proof that at this time a Bride’s Pie and a Scotch Pie are one and the same. With it’s unashamed mixture of sweet, savoury, alcohol and spice, the Bride’s Pie Scotch Pie is undeniably of a much older cooking tradition, one that was rapidly dying out as the Victorian era approached.

Here ends the thread on Scotch Pies. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and learned something along the way: I absolutely did – it’s a subject about which I’ve been gathering factual titbits on for a long time and I promise you it’s the most in-depth read on Scotch Pies you’ll find on the internet. If you enjoyed this be sure to check out my other long-form threads on staple Scottish fayre such as Plain Breid, Morning Rolls and Creamola Foam.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.