Pumpkin Pie at the Gasho Bakery, 1930 — Westerville Historical Society

Holidays are often tied to foods and foodways. A foodway is the way a food or meal is used and celebrated, or as has been stated, the “intersection of food with culture and history.” A pumpkin pie is food; the memories, stories, and traditions the pumpkin pie evokes at autumn holidays are foodways.[1]

The advertisement in Figure 1 put me on the trail of a Halloween foodway. The bakery run by Edmond Gasho at 12 East Main Street used a seasonal picture to illustrate its connection to an American foodway. Cider and doughnuts scream All Hallow’s Eve; so too does pumpkin pie, although Halloween gourmets have to share that dish with the more demure Thanksgiving.

The Gasho family and its bakery, like many family businesses, has a complex history. Fortunately for us, Edmond Gasho’s son, Marvin Gasho, wrote down some recollections many years later, leaving us a bread-crumb trail, as it were, to reconstruct the bakery’s history. Gasho Bakery was started in the fall of 1920. Mr. Gasho and a partner, Charles Barnhard took over an existing bakery at 20 North State Street, previously occupied by John and Bill Day:

There was a gas-fired brick oven at the east end of the building. . . . .Mr. Gasho built a huge wooden ice box using ice for cooling. . . . That ice box was later used at 12 E. Main Street.

The bakery moved in the 1920s, partly due to infighting among the partners. In 1922, the bakery relocated to 10 East Main Street between Wolf’s Meat Market and Bailey’s Pharmacy. The next year, Mr. Gasho sold his share of the partnership to Merle Rizer. Gasho spent a few years outside of Westerville, but was back in the spring of 1926, when he opened the State Street Bakery at 39 North State Street. He later changed the name to Gasho Bakery, then Gasho and Son. Still on the move, the bakery moved to 11 Main Street in 1930. As the Great Depression deepened, Gasho moved one last time to 12 East Main.

An interesting artifact from the last Gasho Bakery location is reproduced in figure 2:

. . . . the “Gasho Bakery” card that customers put in their window, so the bakery truck would stop….

On the flip side (figure 3) offered a starchy paradise of bread, rolls, cakes, and pies that could be ordered. In the lean Depression years, home delivery had an added usefulness.

Gasho’s pumpkin pies were the real thing. According to his advertisement, the family purchased 400 pumpkins to insure the quality of his pumpkin pies. Since most canned pumpkin nowadays is actually made from “Dickinson squash,” a very different looking and tasting vegetable that falls under the “pumpkin” (Cucurbita pepo) label botanically, it may or may not have made the pie we know now.[2]

In June of 1935, E. F. Gasho

. . . .had a major heart attack and he was no longer able to carry on with the baking. He died suddenly the last of August 1935. The bakery was closed in November 1935.

Halloween owes its origin to the Celtic holiday called Samhain. Samhain marked the end of the agricultural year, a time when the line between lifeand death was razor thinand could be easily crossed.[3] The goblin face used in the Gasho advertisement started as a warning for mischievous souls to keep their distance. Mischief may have been on the mind of the lad who seemed prepared to eat an entire pumpkin pie. If he did, the only mischief he might experience was indigestion!

Alan Borer

[1] https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/foodways_when_food_meets_culture_and_history

[2] Joe Sevier, “Canned Pumpkin: It's Not What You Think, Epicurious (September 9, 2016)

[3] Lisa Morton, Trick or Treat: a history of Halloween (London, 2012), 11-16.

All other information comes from the Gasho file, B49237, Westerville History Museum, Westerville Public Library. Many thanks to Jackie Barton and Stephen Grinch for their help.