Monday, October 26, 2015

Getting back to the family business, with an original pie wagon of his grandfathers



Bought new by the family 101 years ago and doing community and charitable service before it retires to the Smithsonian..

It was just featured on the History Channel getting restored http://www.history.com/shows/counting-cars/videos/gary-coopers-1914-model-t



The story of the Copperthite pies can be traced to Antigua, where Henry Copperthite was born in 1847 to indentured servants who landed in the West Indies after the religious wars in Scotland.

Henry’s family eventually won freedom and moved to Connecticut. In 1861, at the age of 14, he enlisted to fight on the side of the North in the Civil War. He joined the 79th Highlanders of New York as a wagon driver; during that time, he traveled to the Washington area, where his regiment was stationed at Georgetown College.

He returned to Connecticut after the war and put his wagon-driving skills to use working for a piemaker. Not satisfied with just making deliveries, he spent the next 20 years learning the baking business.
By 1900, Henry Copperthite was a millionaire.

The Copperthites were making more than 50,000 pies each day and had factories in Capitol Hill, M Street and Wisconsin Avenue. With 15,000 employees, the Connecticut-Copperthite Pie Co. was one of the Washington area’s largest employers, providing pies to members of Congress and the Armed Forces.

“The more I learned about my family history, the more I asked, ‘Why aren’t we doing pies anymore?’ That is our legacy,” Copperthite says. “Plus, our pies are really, really good. A cupcake is a cupcake. And a pie, done right, is always better than a cupcake.”

The secret to the Copperthite pies is really no secret at all: It’s fresh, real ingredients. That means fruit and dairy sourced from local farms, and no artificial ingredients, he says.

“You know why [store-bought] pies went out of fashion? High-fructose corn syrup,” he says.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/resurrecting-a-slice-of-history-easy-as-pie/2012/01/31/gIQAYb5ywQ_story.html

https://www.facebook.com/Connecticut-Copperthite-PIE-Company-112513888834326/


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