A City Full of Fruitcakes
Both Corsicana and its controversial confections offer more than meets the eye
Gunning it down I-45 halfway between the bustling metropolis of Dallas and traffic-choked Houston, the only thing enticing a detour into tiny Corsicana is a billboard touting Collin Street Bakery’s world-famous fruitcake. Yeah, fruitcake. Take your foot off the accelerator, turn onto rural State Highway 31 W, and set your watch back one hundred years. There’s more to this out-of-the-way town, and its fruitcake, than you’d expect.
The skinny rural road passing cattle farms and grain silos crosses a maze of train tracks on the outskirts of town. Steel rails lining what once was one of the country’s busiest crossroads lay frozen in time. Rusted relics of a famed oil boom squat silent. Further up, a lonesome antiquated train car sits across from a sign rising in an arch over Beaton Street announcing, “Historic Corsicana.”
If the sign doesn’t connote the historic district, the sound of your tires rumbling over the original brick streets will. The shady oak-lined lanes’ well-preserved 19th-century buildings, quaint boutiques, and antique shops are a testament to Corsicana's reverence for its past.
Further evidence can be seen in the life-sized bronze statues on downtown sidewalks—a series of commissioned works emphasizing significant events in Corsicana history. Each carries a plaque with a QR code allowing visitors to “hear the history.” One at the corner of 6th Avenue and Beaton Street depicts an oil field worker heading home after a tough day of drilling.
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In 1894, a contractor drilling for water accidentally hit oil, making Corsicana the "birthplace of Texas oil" (even before Spindletop) and first city to build a commercial refinery west of the Mississippi River, the J.S. Cullinan Company—which was later consolidated with other refineries into the Magnolia Petroleum Company, and in 1959 was incorporated into the Mobil Oil Corporation.
The oil boom drew folks from around the world to Corsicana, including master baker Augustus “Gus” Weidmann, who immigrated from Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1896. He’s represented by a bronze statue of a baker a couple of blocks over, commemorating his contribution to Corsicana’s notoriety as the “Fruitcake Capital of the World.”
Weidmann started out baking bread while adapting his European fruitcake recipe to Texas by swapping out walnuts for local pecans, loads of them. Weidmann and partner Thomas McElwee operated their bakery below a Corsicana hotel and began catering to the throngs of visitors traveling through the rich oil boomtown—from opera great Enrico Caruso to humorist Will Rogers. In 1914, when the Ringling Brothers Circus came through, they became such big fans of the fruitcakes that they took loads of them on the road. Soon, hundreds of their friends, family, and fans from across the country were sending letters to the bakery asking if they could send them in the mail. Thus, Collin Street Bakery launched perhaps the first U.S. food mail-order business, ushering in the fruitcake empire that again put Corsicana on the map.
“We caught a comet by the tail,” said Hayden Crawford, Vice President of Public Relations and partner at Collin Street Bakery. “Ever since John Ringling began taking our fruitcakes home in his steamer trunks, we became a trailblazer in the mail order business.”
The mom-and-pop bakery has held onto that comet for more than 125 years—through ownership changes, production expansion, mail order growth, implementation of new products, and financial missteps.
Over the decades, business at family-owned and operated Collin Street Bakery has steadily climbed, with sales during the last two decades hovering between $25 to $40 million annually, selling more than 1.5 million fruitcakes annually in 196 countries. Its clientele includes royalty, presidents, heads of state, film, music, and sports celebrities, not to mention almost 1 million loyal Texans.
Frames lining the walls of the bakery’s 7th Street headquarters display envelopes postmarked from all over the world, with orders from Grace Kelly, country music artist Lyle Lovett, the president of Malawi, cowboy actor Gene Autry, and more.
But, admitted Crawford, “Success hasn’t been without its bumps, no ma’am.” The second-generation bakery spokesperson grew up watching his dad deftly manage hard knocks for the company, and is the first to call out the company’s flaws. Holding up fingers, he counted a few low points for the bakery, starting with Johnny Carson’s fruitcake-dissing wisecracks in the 1970s.
“The worst Christmas gift is fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other,” Carson said on The Tonight Show in 1978. Carson kept the joke alive for years, and the company felt the brunt. The bakery’s CEO and President, Bob McNutt, whose grandfather bought the business in the 1940s, responded with a catchy quote of his own, "What Dom Perignon is to champagne, Collin Street Bakery is to fruitcakes."
McNutt’s nephew Thomas, a fourth-generation family owner-operator laughingly refers to his father as the “visionary” while he is “the implementer who reports to the visionary.” In describing his job, he humbly stated, “I do very little. I just make sure all the trains leave on time.”
Keeping those trains on track has significantly greased the economic wheels in Corsicana. In a city with a population of about 25,000, the bakery hires close to seven hundred seasonal workers to fill the mountain of annual holiday fruitcake orders. For the remainder of the year, a reduced production line oversees ovens that can bake around two thousand cakes at a time.
Additionally, the company co-owns and operates the Navarro Pecan Company, which is among the largest pecan shelling plants in the world. This helps ensure consistent production of Collin Street Bakery’s number one seller, the DeLuxe Fruitcake, which is made up of eighty percent fruit and nuts, and of that, thirty percent consists of pecans. This density accounts in part for the cake’s early popularity, as it can stay fresh in the metal tin for months without refrigeration.
In addition, Collin Street Bakery established one of the world’s largest organic pineapple farms in Costa Rica, Finca Corsicana (which has since been mostly sold to Dole Pineapple). It also jumped into the coffee business by growing coffee beans in the mountains of Costa Rica, which are sold under the brand Cinchona Coffee at the bakery. Closer to home, the partners started a computer-based company in Dallas to manage the mail-order business.
“We’ve branched out in all aspects of our company to avoid being exposed to the whims of fluctuations that can impact our business,” Crawford stated. He noted that the diverse corporate facets contributed to the scandal that nearly took the historic company down a decade ago.
The Fruitcake Scandal
In 2014, the Collin Street Bakery became the setting for a bizarre crime investigation when the bakery’s long-time corporate controller and accountant, Sandy Jenkins, and his wife, were caught in an embezzlement scheme that siphoned off about $17 million from the bakery to finance their secret lavish lifestyle.
Jenkins, who’d handled the bakery’s books for fifteen years, managed to keep his theft under the radar, spending the company’s money on private jets, exotic vacations, jewelry, watches and so many luxury items that Neiman-Marcus in Dallas nick-named him “Fruitcake” and his wife “Cupcake.” The company, with its wildly successful international sales, was baffled each year as to why it continued hemorrhaging money.
“To get it, you have to understand the culture around here. We’re like a family. We couldn’t imagine one of our own stealing from us,” Crawford said.
“Trust is a key value in the company and this town. Always has been,” said Jerry Grimmett, who worked at the bakery for sixty years and served as the model for the bronze statue representing Collin Street Bakery’s founder. He frequently drops by the bakery, even though he recently retired.
To get to the bottom of things, the company hired a young accounting clerk, Semetric Walker, to review the books. She scoured years of financial documents and when things didn’t add up, she dug deeper, only to find that the culprit was her boss. She blew the whistle. After a long trial, Jenkins was sentenced to 120 months in federal prison, where he committed suicide, but not before personally apologizing to the folks at Collin Street Bakery.
“He called us from jail. He couldn’t explain it, but said once he started, he couldn’t stop,” Crawford said. “It shook up everyone, and not just at the bakery. The whole town felt it.”
The scandal had a profound impact on the community, especially as FBI investigators poured in, followed by a documentary film crew, and a bevy of journalists. The residents of Corsicana became part of the story, with many featured in the documentary series, Fruitcake Fraud. One line in the movie aptly sizes up the small-town character of Corsicana: “The gossip is home before you get home.”
Corsicana’s 175th Anniversary
Throughout 2023, ongoing festivities have packed local calendars with parades, art exhibits, galas, and theatre performances, all culminating in a city-wide time capsule ceremony in October. Locals gathered to bury pieces of town history that won’t be uncovered until the year 2048, for its 200th birthday celebration. In attendence was Sylvia Navarro Tillotson, great-great-great granddaughter of Jose Antonio Navarro, a Tejano patriot and one of the founders of Texas who helped to establish Corsicana in 1848.
Although the 175th kept the chamber busy over the past year, the town is now abuzz with plans to make Corsicana a key destination for the upcoming April 8, 2024 solar eclipse. Since the eclipse's path will make the city an ideal spot for viewing the phenomenon, the city formed a Solar Eclipse Committee to prepare for the event. One example of promotion concepts sits on the corner of Crawford’s desk at Collin Street Bakery: an artist’s rendering of the eclipse logo, being considered for a special fruitcake tin to mark the occasion.
Artistic endeavors, even on a cake tin, are a signature aspect of Corsicana—whose art scene has risen dynamically in recent years, beginning in 2015 when visual artist Kyle Hobratschk opened 100 West Corsicana, an artist-in-residence program. Housed in the former Odd Fellows Lodge building, the bohemian digs regularly host world-class artists.
The town’s artistic leanings show up in the scattered murals covering the library and other walls downtown, most paying homage to regional history and local commercial ventures that have stood the test of time, like Wolf Brand Chili (founded in Corsicana).
A cornerstone in Corsicana’s arts scene is the Palace Theatre, a restored 1921 Vaudeville-era venue presenting concerts, comedies, and musicals. Other performance venues include The Warehouse Living Arts Center, a gallery and performance hub, the Corsicana Opry, and Outside the Lines Creative Studios—featuring theatrical productions, stand-up comedy, and live music.
Offsetting the more intimate theatrical venues downtown is Schulman's Movie Bowl Grille—a theater, dining, and arcade complex covering nearly 34,000 square feet on eight acres in the Corsicana Crossing retail district.
Before heading out of the historic area, have coffee at Mita’s Coffee House or grab a bite at Across the Street Diner or Across the Street Bistro. Then check out shops like Peace, Love, Retro—a funky resale store on Beaton Street with an eclectic mix of vintage apparel, concert T-shirts, vinyl records, and kitschy home décor.
[Want to try to make your own fruitcake? Here's a recipe for publisher James Fox-Smith's favorite.]
Next, drive through the Carriage District along Second, Third, and Fourth Avenues, where many grand homes built between 1846 and 1900 feature side entrances to house horse carriages and are marked with a Texas or Corsicana Historic Landmark plaque.
If that’s not enough history for one afternoon, visit Pioneer Village to get a feel for life on the Texas frontier, or drive through Petroleum Park, the site of the first oil discovery in Texas, which forever changed the Lone Star State.
And before veering back to the highway, swing by the Collin Street Bakery to pick up a fruitcake for Christmas. Don’t worry if you’re passing through when it’s nowhere near Christmas time. It’ll keep.