America’s Oldest Bakery Still Baking: Inside Winkler Bakery’s 200-Year-Old Traditions

Article by: Sarah Bisacca | Photography by Sarah Bisacca  | Published August 24, 2026

The Work Begins Before Morning

The wood goes in the night before. 

That’s the first thing Deborah Crewes — known to her colleagues at C. Winkler Bakery as Sister Deborah — will tell you, if you ask how a day in America’s oldest operating bakery actually begins. Not at dawn, not at 3 a.m. when the bakers would have risen in Christian Winkler’s time, but the evening before, when seasoned logs are stacked inside the mouth of the beehive brick oven to dry overnight. The wood in the woodshed won’t burn clean enough. The wood in the window is for tomorrow. The wood in the oven is for today. It’s a cycle that has turned, one way or another, since 1807. when bakers would have risen in Christian Winkler’s time, but the evening before: when seasoned logs are stacked inside the mouth of the beehive brick oven to dry overnight. The wood in the woodshed won’t burn clean enough. The wood in the window is for tomorrow. The wood in the oven is for today. It’s a cycle that has turned, in one form or another, since 1807.

Tucked inside Old Salem Museum & Gardens in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Winkler Bakery sits on a cobblestone street flanked by 18th-century buildings that still (more or less) serve their original purposes. A leatherworker still makes shoes. A blacksmith still works iron. And in the low-ceilinged bakehouse, where Christian Winkler once woke before dawn to light his fire, baked goods still emerge each morning warm from the oven, wrapped and counted, ready for the original street-facing sales window.A blacksmith still works iron, and in the low-ceilinged bakehouse where Christian Winkler once woke before dawn to light his fire, baked goods still arrive every morning warm from the oven, wrapped and counted, ready for the original sales window that faces the street. 

A System Designed to Endure

The Moravians who settled this part of North Carolina in the 1750s were, above all, organized people. They purchased nearly 100,000 acres along the three forks of Muddy Creek — a tract chosen deliberately for its position along trade routes — and planned their towns down to the placement of each tradesperson before they arrived. Salem was their commercial hub. The baker was essential. 

Swiss-born Christian Winkler came to Salem from Lititz, Pennsylvania in the early 1800s, having trained as a master baker in Germany. He arrived on a cold, rainy November evening, horse in hand, carrying everything he owned, and, according to his own memoirs, stopped along the way to purchase a pair of silk trousers suitable for marriage. He met Elizabeth Dance, a Latin teacher at what is now Salem College, within days of his arrival. They married within in under three weeks. The bakery was theirs. 

What followed was 120 years of Winkler family stewardship, including one of its most remarkable chapters: when Charles Winkler died young in 1893, his wife Alice went before the church council, — more than once, — to ask permission to run the bakery herself. Permission was not immediately granted. When it was, the decision was exceptional. They eventually said yes. She ran the bakery it until 1913, raised eleven children, expanded into a seasonal ice cream parlor and a smoked oyster operation (oysters shipped by rail from Morehead City, kept cold in an ice house just around the corner), and reportedly sold four or five barrels of ginger beer on busy Saturdays. One of her sons even carried her custard-style ice cream to the Chicago World’s Fair, where it earned recognition, an unusual distinction for a product so rooted in place. She lived to be 91. 

Sister Deborah has spent the last 18 years inside these walls, absorbing not just the history but the habits that sustain it. absorbing it all. She came as a sales associate and stayed to become the bakery’s living institutional memory, reading baker memoirs, learning to fire the oven, and eventually leading hands-on history demonstrations for culinary students, school groups, and food writers from around the world. She wears a period costume every single day. “I loved the history,” she says simply. “The architecture, the dynamics, the scientific part of how they did it that many years ago.” 

Heat, Knowledge, and the Limits of Measurement

The science is considerable. The beehive brick oven — circular at the base, domed overhead like its namesake — has to burn for roughly three hours before a single loaf goes in. The squirrel-tail flue wraps up and over the brickwork before making a precise 45-degree turn up the chimney, heating the oven from the top down. When the fire collapses into coals, the ashes are raked through a trap door beneath the oven floor, where they continue radiating heat from below. There are no thermometers. Readiness is judged empirically:The test for readiness is a pinch of cornmeal scattered across the brick floor: if it skips like it’s on water, the oven is too hot. If it slides across and browns beautifully, it’s time. 

Winkler’s bakers knew their oven intimately, including a cluster of three bricks near the center that have shifted slightly over two centuries, leaving a half-inch gap where heat doesn’t hold. You work around it. You learn it. 

This is tacit knowledge, embedded, cumulative, and resistant to standardization.That kind of knowledge doesn’t transfer from a manual. 

What Endures, What Adapts

The bread itself has stayed remarkably close to its origins. One-pound loaves are weighed out at 17 ounces before baking so that moisture loss yields a true pound. Ninety-six can fit in the oven at once, baking in 22 to 23 minutes — fast, because heat comes at them from all sides. They puff up almost perfectly round, crackling at the crust and soft all the way through. The sugar cake, still the bakery’s most beloved item, uses the original recipe: starch from real mashed potatoes worked into the dough, twice-risen, topped with salted butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon blended so thoroughly that, as Sister Deborah describes it, “you can’t tell where the cinnamon starts or the brown sugar stops.” 

Then there are the ginger cookies. Three merchants had the right to sell them in old Salem, and each did it differently: one in blocks, one at the tavern for travelers passing through, and Christian Winkler in the form of a cookie. He used black molasses as the base, strengthened with cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, and allspice. They were thick and crunchy, sturdy enough to survive a saddlebag or a coat pocket on a twenty-mile walk. The paper-thin version came later, born of practicality: leftover dough rolled out fine and slipped into the cooling “slack oven” at the end of a bake, set aside for children coming home from school or for unexpected company. What began as resourcefulness became a regional icon. Some things at Winkler’s change slowly; others don’t change at all. What began as thrift became tradition.

Today, the brick oven no longer fires for retail. Since 2018, baking has moved to an off-site facility where a small team works through the night, delivering fresh, scratch-made goods each morning by van. Some arrive still warm. The loaves go out flat to cool before anyone stacks them. Sister Deborah is there early to count inventory, check quality, and consult with the head baker — a conversation that can stretch to two hours and covers everything from that day’s school groups to last year’s sales to the weather. Continuity, here, is managed as much as it is inherited. She dreams about baked goods at night. At Christmas, she walks the floor with a calculator, ensuring there’s enough sugar cake to go around. 

A Living Practice

What hasn’t changed is the soul of the place. The cooling racks with their wooden slats still line the walls of the oven room. The original brass scale still sits on the worktable. Elohiza Hernandez, Sister Deborah’s granddaughter and now a coordinator at the Old Salem visitor’s center, grew up watching her grandmother arrive at elementary school classrooms in costume, sugar cake and ginger cookies in hand, and says the kids she books for tours today still carry the same wonder home with them.  The transmission is intergenerational, not just of recipes, but of meaning. 

“Going across the bridge from the visitor’s center into Old Salem,” Elohiza says, “it’s like stepping back in time.” 

Cross the bridge. Step inside the low doorway. Smell the cinnamon. What persists here is not nostalgia, but practice — continuous, adaptive, and still very much alive. America’s oldest bakery is still open.