Before the republic had a name, a mill on the Neponset was grinding chocolate.

Before the republic had a name, a mill on the Neponset River was grinding chocolate.

The country that would declare itself in 1776 was already, in 1764, drinking something made in Dorchester, Massachusetts, by two men who had almost nothing in common except the river that ran their stones. One had the skill and no money. The other had the money and wanted a name. Between them they made the first chocolate manufactured in America, and the name they settled on is still on a green box in the baking aisle two hundred and sixty years later.

No older American grocery brand survives.

The Founding

Dr. James Baker was a physician with a general store in Dorchester and capital to spare. John Hannon was an Irish immigrant who had learned to refine chocolate in England — a craft that until then had belonged to Europe — and had carried it across the ocean with empty pockets. Local lore says Baker found Hannon weeping on the bank of the Neponset, broke and far from home, knowing the one valuable thing nobody in America yet knew how to do. Whether or not the tears are true, the bargain was real. Baker leased space in a sawmill, bought a run of millstones and a set of kettles, and put Hannon to work grinding imported cocoa beans between the stones into a thick, dark, bitter syrup.

The first product was not a candy bar. Nobody ate chocolate then; they drank it. The syrup was pressed into hard cakes, and a household scraped or grated a piece into boiling water or milk, sweetened it heavily, and drank it down as a rich, warming restorative. The cakes went out under the name Hannon’s Best Chocolate, wrapped in a promise that was startling for 1764: if the chocolate does not prove good, the money will be returned. A money-back guarantee on food, before the Revolution, from a man most customers would never meet.

The Rise

The partnership did not hold. By 1772 the two men had fallen out, and Baker opened a second mill of his own while Hannon worked the first; for a while they were rivals on the same river. Then came the harder turn. In 1779, with the Revolution choking the ports and raw cocoa scarce, Hannon sailed for the West Indies to buy beans himself and never came back. He may have drowned. He may, some said, have walked away from a marriage he no longer wanted and let the sea take the blame. After a bitter dispute with his widow, Elizabeth, Baker bought out her share in 1780, joined the two mills into one, and sold the first chocolate under the name that would outlast them all: Baker’s.

The chocolate rose with the country. During the Revolution, when Americans threw British tea into the harbor and swore off it, they drank chocolate instead, and because the British navy blockaded the ports, the cocoa beans had to be run past the warships at real risk — so every steaming cup was a small act of defiance. The business passed down through the family by blood and marriage: to Baker’s son Edmund, who built a proper mill; to his son Walter, a Harvard-trained lawyer who gave the firm its lasting name, Walter Baker & Company, and made sure the word “Baker’s” was protected for the generations after him. The brand spread out of New England, reached California in the Gold Rush years, and became the chocolate the country baked with.

The man who made it national was Henry Pierce, Walter Baker’s step-nephew, who started as a clerk at three dollars a week and ended up running the company for three decades. Pierce was a modern marketer born a century early. He bought up the local competition, carried the chocolate to the world’s fairs and came home with medals, and advertised in some eight thousand newspapers at once. And he gave the brand its face. Taken with an eighteenth-century pastel he had seen of a Viennese chocolate-shop server — Anna Baltauf, a poor knight’s daughter whom a smitten prince had married and immortalized — Pierce made her the company’s emblem: La Belle Chocolatière, the chocolate girl carrying her tray, registered as a trademark in 1883 and still on the box today, often called the oldest product trademark still in use in America. Pierce did one more thing without quite meaning to. He kept on an employee named Samuel German, who in 1852 had formulated a sweeter dark baking chocolate; the company named it for him, German’s Sweet Chocolate, and a century later a Dallas newspaper printed a cake recipe that dropped the apostrophe. An American worker’s name became, by a typesetter’s slip, a German tradition. The cake carries the error still.

The Turn

The mill that had ground America’s first chocolate could not grind it forever. After Pierce died in 1896 the family era ended; the Forbes Syndicate bought the company, kept the name, and ran it from Dorchester. Then the conglomerates came. Postum Cereal bought Walter Baker & Company in 1927 and became General Foods. General Foods was swallowed by Philip Morris in 1985, folded together with Kraft a few years later, and the lineage runs now into Kraft Heinz. Somewhere in that passage the chocolate stopped being a Dorchester thing. In 1965, after two centuries on the Neponset, General Foods closed the Lower Mills works and moved production to Dover, Delaware. The stones went quiet. After two hundred years, the river ran past a mill that no longer ground anything, and the chocolate that had been a Dorchester thing since before the Revolution was made now in Quebec, by machines that had never smelled the Neponset.

The Reckoning

The cozy nostalgia around an old chocolate brand has to make room for a harder fact about its first century. Before slavery ended in 1865, Walter Baker & Company sold its drinking chocolate in three named grades — Best, Common, and Inferior — and the Inferior grade was made for and sold to slaveholders, bought in bulk as a cheap, calorie-dense ration to feed enslaved people worked to exhaustion on West Indian and American plantations. The raw beans themselves came, in those years, largely from plantations in the West Indies and South America that ran on chattel slavery. The chocolate that warmed New England parlors and stood for colonial defiance was, at its lowest grade and its source alike, entangled in the labor of people who had no choice and no cup of their own. An honest account of America’s first chocolate sets that down plainly beside the romance, because both are true and the brand’s own record carries it.

What Endures

What endures is partly the green box on the shelf — Kraft Heinz still sells Baker’s, La Belle Chocolatière still carries her tray across the label, the drinking cakes long since given way to baking bars and cocoa. But the deeper thing that endures is in Dorchester. The fourteen acres of brick mills along the Neponset, the sprawl that earned the neighborhood the name Chocolate Village, did not come down. They were saved and made into apartments, and people cook today in modern kitchens built inside the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century walls where the country’s first chocolate was ground. For two hundred years the smell of roasting cocoa hung over the whole neighborhood, carried on the wind into Savin Hill and Hyde Park, so thick that old residents still remember waking to it. When the company left in 1965 the great Walter Baker sign on the 1919 administration building went dark, and it stayed dark for fifty-six years — until the neighbors raised sixty-six thousand dollars, took the letters down, restored them, and lit them again. A river, a pair of millstones, a penniless chocolatier and the doctor who staked him, a chocolate girl borrowed from a Dresden gallery, and a sign glowing once more over the place where it all began.

Baker’s ground America’s first chocolate, and that is worth remembering.

Why Baker’s Chocolate? It is the oldest American consumer brand still on a grocery shelf — founded in 1764, before the republic itself — and for decades it was the only commercial chocolate made on the continent, the name that taught the country first to drink chocolate and then to bake with it.