From Bakery to Wonderland

Seen from the street, the Tip Top Building in White River Junction looks like your ordinary brick and mortar structure. But enter it from the parking lot and you walk into a sort of wonderland. Though there are no frazzled talking rabbits, dormice, or inverted flamingos used as croquet mallets, there is a wide assortment of artists, healers, and business people, pottery and printing studios, and a restaurant.  Perhaps more notably, there are homing pigeons, a historian of pre-Copernican cosmology, and someone who —if you’re not alert—will hand you a life-size model of a human prostate made on a 3-D printer.

According to town records, the Tip Top’s “AYB” (approximate year built) is 1880, though some records put it in 1871. Whatever its exact age, it sheltered some mighty important enterprises back when White River Junction was a manufacturing and transportation hub.

The building’s lineage is almost purely baking, beginning with the Smith family bakery, which started in Hanover in 1815 and was known for the famous Hanover Cracker. Though crackers today feel pretty mundane, they were a critical food source in the 19^th century. Known as “hard tack,” they provided a calorie-dense lifeline for soldiers and sailors over the centuries. In the 1880’s the Smith enterprise produced up to 65,000 crackers a day.  

Owner George Smith eventually purchased the Vermont Baking Company and moved from Hanover to the Tip Top (not the name then) for better product distribution: the train still runs right behind the building. In fact, White River Junction was once a major interchange for five rail lines and up to 50 passenger trains a day. By the 1880’s, there were fourteen railroad tracks in town—which was considered the most important railroad village in northern New England at the time.

Smith’s company—at that point called the Vermont Baking Company—eventually sold to the Ward Baking Company, whose signature brand was Tip Top, a name still visible (though fading) on the building’s back wall. Ward occupied the space from the 1940’s until 1974. The company (with facilities along the Eastern seaboard and throughout the Midwest) grew to be the largest commercial baker in the US.  Fully mechanized, it was famous for the slogan:  “From baker to consumer, untouched by the human hand.”  Ward Baking eventually turned into Continental Baking—which produced Wonder Bread and Twinkies—but that was later and not in White River.

The departure of the Ward company in 1974 marked the end of baking at the Tip Top. Ownership passed to T & L Electric, a motor winding operation owned by Harold and Velma Tobin. When Matt Bucy bought the building in 2000 it was mostly empty.  Once he had renovated a few spaces, Bucy—an engineer and architect—held an open house, which he says was mobbed, allowing him to rent out most of the unfinished parts of the building, using chalk to draw future walls on the concrete floor.  And thus was born the Tip Top Media and Arts Building.

According to Bucy, the building is actually a conglomeration of seven buildings. “It was [originally] eight,” he says, but he detached a 5,000-square-foot metal building and deposited it in the parking lot with a sign inviting someone to take it away. Which someone did.  Bucy thinks it’s in Rutland now.

He chose a vivid palette for the concrete walls and floors, and friends did the painting. The result is lively colors on walls and floors, along with iridescent silver and exposed bricks. Add staircases that seem to appear out of nowhere, charming crannies, original ceramics in niches, mid-century schoolroom desks and walls covered in artwork (including a six-person, life-size, wall-mounted sculpture of adults in their natural, unclothed state sculpted by Barbara Cislicki, who is no longer a renter) and you have the Tip Top.  What a treat it must be to come to work in this environment!

Roaming around on a quiet afternoon I saw an open door and popped into Quel Imaging, where I met Ethan LaRochelle (Thayer grad, creator of the business and the person who handed me the prostate) and Eammon Littler (Dartmouth grad).  Quel is a bio-tech start-up that develops medical optical imaging systems and contrast agents. That is, it investigates the ways that light interacts with human tissue, particularly in a surgical setting. Quel’s space was occupied for a time by Google and Ethan showed me a walk-in fridge from the bakery days that Google employees used for meetings. It put me in mind of a bomb shelter or panic room.

As for those birds you sometimes see rising from the top of the Tip Top, they are homing pigeons, the much-loved possessions of Jacob Colby, the building’s manager.  A Canterbury, New Hampshire, native and longtime pigeon fancier, he is protective of his birds and flies them only occasionally, “especially when hawks are not around,” he said. Colby has a love/hate relationship with hawks. “They are beautiful, but they’re my enemy.” His concern for his pigeons renders him superstitious about naming them, hoping to fool the hawks about how much he cares for his birds.

All in all, the Tip Top Building is uniquely White River Junction and, I believe, admired and loved by everyone who works, eats, or creates therein, or simply walks through its historic and whimsical hallways. And don’t worry: As labyrinthine as it may feel, the occupants are friendly and you won’t get lost.

Sarah Copps lives in Enfield with her husband, cat, and dog.  Her writing includes newspaper reporting, freelance writing, and literary fiction.