HISTORY OF JOSEPH BAKER’S LTD., BRANTFORD, ONTARIO, CANADA.

Joseph Baker’s original company set up in 1870 to produce the patented flour scoop/sifter. The company was liquidated in1919 after selling its Canadian business to Joseph Baker Sons & Perkins (Canada) Ltd and its business in the USA to Joseph Baker Sons & Perkins Co. Inc.

Joseph Edward Baker.

With the Bakers firmly settled in their new factory in Willesden, North America became the most important outlet for their machinery. Augustus Muir tells us that - "From 1891, the firm was represented there by Joseph Edward Baker - a cousin who had joined the two elder brothers on their travels to sell Baker flour sieves. He had made his headquarters at Brantford, two dozen miles from Hamilton in Ontario; and in his red brick house there grew up a family of which ***all the members were to participate in the progress of the Baker firm on the American continent. As a salesman, Joseph Edward Baker travelled from Halifax in the east to San Francisco on the pacific coast. In his absence, it was his wife who looked after the orders as they came in and welcomed visitors from the London firm who used the house as their headquarters.

There was no question of Joseph Edward Baker establishing a new factory in Ontario to replace the old one in Trenton, which had been dismantled when the family had moved to London; all supplies of machinery for sale from Brantford were now imported from England". (See also here).

Augustus Muir tells the story of Joseph Baker and Joseph Edward Baker travelling to Newfoundland to sell flour sifters. - "In St, John's, they met a dealer who, in a sudden transport of enthusiasm, gave them a prodigious order. When they reckoned up the number of households on the island, they decided that the dealer had ordered enough to last Newfoundland for a hundred years.......... 'Neither of us', Joseph Baker is said to have confessed afterwards, 'had the nerve to go back to Newfoundland!".

[NOTE: *** Joseph Edward Baker married Emily Phair and they had four children:

• R. Elmer Baker (1885-1970 - whose daughter, Charlotte Isabel Baker, married Franklin Braithwaite. Elmer Baker was the first president of Baker Perkins Inc., retiring in 1950 at the age of sixty-five.
• Gladys Helen Baker - whose twin daughter, Josephine Harley, married Ivor Baker.
• Emily Marguerite Baker (1890-1968) - who was the secretary-treasurer of the Canadian company until her retirement in 1950.
• Joseph Albert Baker (1897-1956) - who started in the Canadian company in 1921; and in 1930, after it had become a subsidiary of the American firm, he had joined Baker Perkins Inc. It was not until just before WW2 that he had gone back to the Canadian business, the headquarters of which had been transferred from Brantford to Toronto. He became president of Baker Perkins Inc on the retirement of his elder brother, Elmer Baker, but was compelled to resign because of ill health in 1955].

Joseph Edward was intimately involved with the first ever sale of a travelling oven for bread. This application had been discussed by him with the firm of Harrison Brothers of Montreal during 1908 and it fell to his son, R.Elmer Baker, newly returned from training at Willesden, to complete the contract.(See also here and here).