Scovil Bakery

This beautifully restored bakery includes an example of the popular bustle oven of the 1840s.  Sample a tasty gingerbread cookie, too.

            --from a Nauvoo Restoration pamphlet

      The Scovil Bakery was my first ever visit to one of the sites maintained by Nauvoo Restoration, Inc.  Nauvoo Restoration was begun by Dr. LeRoy Kimball rather accidentally, but we will talk of that later.  Because right now we are talking about cookies.

      I don’t know why the Scovil Bakery was my first choice of sites to visit (unless it was the lure of Cookie), but the bakery was indicative of the sort of fun to be had down on the flats (the old, Mormon section of Nauvoo, down by the river).  First, there were the congenial old ladies happily telling us the ins and outs of bustle ovens (“ins and outs” being really quite funny if you are familiar with bustle ovens), and then there were the interesting facts of frontier life, for instance: women catching fire and dying.

      You would think fashion would follow survival, but not necessarily so.  Those long skirts women were wearing back then had a knack of flinging through the fireplace and going up in flame.  After childbirth, death by flaming skirt was the number two killer of women.  This is not a happy statistic.  You have to wonder why, if one was in the privacy of one’s own home, one could not change into something a little less life-threatening—culottes say.  Disaster was common, tragedy ever imminent.  As we would soon learn from a helpful placard on our first field trip, death was very common in the 1800s.

      And the Scovils were no exception.  All sorts of people in their little family are buried in Nauvoo.  Babies, for instance.

      Life was rough back then, but life, no matter how rough life gets, it always retains some element of joy.  For instance, after all the tragic fact sharing, the Sisters gave me a cookie.

      I ate it.¹

      But I was determined to bring another one of those happy, human-shaped cookies home with me as a jealousy-inducing souvenir.  I would often return to the bakery for another cookie, only to bite off its head and legs before getting it to safety. Finally, towards the end of my Nauvoo experience, I made a great advance in my plan and asked the Sister at the bakery if I mightn’t have two.  One to eat, I explained, and one to preserve.  And might she have any idea how best to preserve a gingerbread cookie for future generations?

      I was given directions to the home of an Elder with lacquer, but I never did make it there; alas, I had not left myself enough time before the semester’s end.  And now my little gingerbread man lies folded up in bubblewrap, one arm broken off, in my Nauvoo filebox.  It’s very sad.  If it gets much sadder, I may just have to inject some joy into my life by eating him too.  It’s not an easy task, being a gingerbread man, but you do make the world a better place.

[ill-peace, love & gingerbread]