C. Winkler Bakery

Before dawn, someone arrives to start the oven.

That oven has been burning wood since 1799, when the Moravian Church built this bakery on South Main Street in Old Salem — a working hearth below, a living quarter for the baker above. The Church ran it that way until 1807, when a Swiss-born baker named Christian Winkler took over from the original baker, Thomas Butner Jr., and made it his own. Winkler, his third wife Elizabeth, and their six children lived and worked here for the rest of their lives. His descendants kept it in the family through 1926 — a span that included his grandson Charles and Charles's wife Alice, who added a front porch and second-floor balcony, and then Alice's daughter Bessie and her husband Robert Spaugh, who ran it until the end.

After 1926, the building drifted. A tea room, then a coffee house, apartments upstairs, an antiques store, a knitting shop, a sewing shop. The slow dispersal that swallows most old buildings whole. Old Salem Museum and Gardens acquired it in 1963 and restored it to its original appearance in 1968.

The building itself was constructed by Salem's master builder and mason Johann Gottlob Krause, shortly before his death — uncut stone on the first story, hand-made brick above.

The oven is the point. Workers arrive before dawn, start the fire, and by around 7:30 am the flames have faded and the bricks hold the heat — around 700°F at peak, then left to fall to around 400°F before baking begins. Wikipedia names it the oldest continually operating bakery in North Carolina. The most popular thing that comes out of it is Moravian sugar cake.

Salem was built on the idea that a community could hold something in common and make it last. The bakery on South Main Street is the oldest proof they were right.