History
Rise Up bakery is a historic Italian bakery that was treasured and passionately restored by the local community, volunteers and by the best professional bakers and oven builders of the USA over a 6 year period.
On October 1, 1913, the Barre City Council granted a permit to build an annex to the Old Labour Hall for a bakery building. When it was completed, the Barre Daily Times reported that “the Cooperative organization will have one of the largest provision establishments in the city.”
The bakery was fitted with a wood-fired oven, made entirely of bricks and concrete and situated in the eastern corner of the building’s main block. This great oven had a large arched chamber and had the capacity to bake 100 to 150 loaves of bread at one time. (Although the oven has since been removed, the outlines of its position can still be discerned on the remaining masonry.)
The Bakers
Batista Fumagalli
From 1910 to 1929, Batista Fumagalli was the head and heart of the bakery. He operated it as a small, old-world style bakery catering primarily to the Italian immigrant community within the immediate area. It remained unique in that it was Barre’s first true Italian bakery, adding greatly to the vitality of the surrounding neighborhood and its thriving Italian community. Most of the business at the co-op store and bakery was by delivery, offering their goods to a range of boarding houses around the Granite Street neighborhood.
In 1916, Fumagalli purchased the bakery from the Cooperative, and began to operate it under his own name. During the Great Depression Batista Fumagalli formulated a work-sharing schedule for his employees that included two weeks of work and one week off, thus allowing a greater number of people to work. In this sense, the socialist work ethic adhered to by Fumagalli enabled the bakery to thrive during harsh economic times while allowing more people to benefit by working.
Unfortunately, fate was not kind to bakery or the Union Co-operative Store. Granite Street was subject to major flooding in 1925 and again in 1927. (The Co-op sustained the greatest losses of any business in Barre.) The flood in November of 1927 was especially disastrous, during which the Winooski River and its tributaries swelled far beyond their banks. The co-op store and the accompanying bakery narrowly survived the flood, but were not able to remain in business much longer.
By the end of 1928, Fumagalli merged his bakery with the Modern Bakery to become the largest bakery in Barre and relocated to its premises on Brook Street, taking all of the bakery equipment with him.
Gioseppi (Joseph) Piccolini
The bakery stood vacant for a period of time after Fumagalli moved out, but by 1936 it was again occupied and used for baking old-world Italian bread. Gioseppi (Joseph) Piccolini ran a substantial business from the building, delivering his goods primarily to private residences, but also to area grocery stores such as the A & P. Bread made in the bakery was simple, and included Vienna bread, French bread, butter rolls, and round loaves which were placed on a layer of cornmeal directly on the masonry surface of the oven. Loaves were sold at the store. Deliveries were made by trucks, displaying the words “Gioseppi Piccolini & Sons” on the side.
This was not a propitious time to start a business, and Gioseppi Piccolini’s bakery finally succumbed to the pressure and competition of larger bakeries. In the early 1940’s, Piccolini closed the establishment and went on to work for Batista Fumagalli at his flourishing Brook Street bakery and the doors of the former Co-op bakery building were finally closed.
Bakery building, 1998
The bakery building has changed hands a number of times and has been used primarily for storage since 1940 when it ceased to operate as a bakery. In 1958, the bakery was sold to Rock of Ages GraniteCompany and used for granite storage.
With this change of ownership to a business requiring large amounts of storage space, it is likely that the brick oven was removed at this time. The title was transferred a number of times during the 1960s and came to be owned in 1964 by Rouleau Granite Company, which used the building for storage until 2001. It was then owned and leased out by John Dernavich for storage use.
In September 2004, the building was acquired by the Barre Historical Society at the dispersal auction of Dernavich’s Desilets Granite Co and reunited with the Old Labor Hall property. The property was a sad little building which has stood empty since that acquisition, but nowadays restored by caring local community, volunteers and generosity of many people .
For more information, please visit the Old Labor Hall.
To learn more about the Bakery as it is today, see Today