The Bama Pie Story
Bama Pie Company (1936), Dallas TX.
I know, I know, I said I didn't want to do documentary photography, but I have to tell the story of Bama Pie Co, because it's so cool.
Cornelia Alabama Marshall started baking sweet potato pies in her kitchen in the early 1920s. She sold them at a Dallas drugstore fountain. People lined up on the sidewalk. When the Depression hit and her husband Henry lost his job, he took the family's entire savings — $1.67 — and turned her kitchen operation into a door-to-door business. Their son Paul built it into a company, chose this Pennsylvania Avenue site in 1936 because it was near the streetcar line, then eventually moved the operation to Tulsa and landed the McDonald's fried apple pie contract.
The Bama Companies still operate in Tulsa today, three generations on, still family-owned, making biscuits, hand-held pies, frozen pancakes, and pizza dough for some of the largest restaurant chains in the country.
Not bad for a $1.67 investment — about $28 in today's money.
And I never would have heard of this place if I wasn't wandering around South Dallas, looking for abandoned spaces to photograph.