Oswald Jaeger was born to bake. Only 15 when he arrived in Milwaukee from Austria in 1872, Jaeger promptly apprenticed himself to an established baker. Within a few years, he had learned enough to open a shop of his own on North Third Street, German Milwaukee’s downtown.
It was so successful that in 1881 he built a larger bakery near Ninth and Walnut, pictured here. Although Jaeger sold a full line of baked goods, including stollen and pfeffernüsse at Christmastime, he was best known for his rye bread, available in varieties ranging from caraway to buttermilk.
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Jaeger’s loaves were so popular that by 1896, the approximate date of this photo, he needed five horse-drawn wagons to supply Milwaukee-area grocery stores, restaurants and hotels.
Oswald Jaeger died in 1910, but his son, another Oswald, carried the business to even greater heights. In 1921, the much-expanded bakery operated 19 ovens that could turn out 60,000 loaves of bread every 24 hours – more than 40 a minute.
The company became one of a handful of Milwaukee bakeries to develop a regional wholesale business; its bread was sold throughout the Midwest and well beyond. In the 1930s and ’40s, Jaeger rye was regularly shipped by air mail to a customer in Argentina, and Milwaukee native Spencer Tracy’s wife had her loaf sent west every Wednesday.
Generations of Jaegers made their bakery the largest in Milwaukee, but even the strongest regional firms were swept away in an industry-wide wave of consolidation. Beginning with Beatrice Foods in 1965 and ending with Sara Lee in 2001, the Jaeger bakery became the nameless division of one conglomerate after another.
In 2005, Sara Lee closed the plant in a cost-cutting measure. After 124 years and millions of loaves, North Siders no longer woke up every morning to the aroma of fresh-baked Jaeger bread.
TAKE A CLOSER LOOK…
- These buildings were razed in 1919 to make way for a three-story addition to the business.
- Oswald Jaeger lived above the bakery with his wife and their five children.
- Wooden sidewalks and unpaved streets dominated Milwaukee’s landscape in the 1890s.
- White aprons and flour-dusted trousers were standard attire for Jaeger’s bakers.
IN COLLABORATION WITH MILWAUKEE COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY
