“Mrs. Carrie Ives Saunders is one of the most noted lecturers on scientific cooking and domestic science in America, and it is both a treat and privilege to be counted among her hearers.” Detroit Free, January 6, 1905.
Although it only a fragment of a packing crate, this artifact opens a window to the life of Carrie Ives Saunders and the limited employment opportunities for women in the nineteenth century. (Pictured center.)
Born in Lockport New York in 1854, Carrie Saunders came to Saginaw, according to her obituary, in 1876. At this point not much known about her career until 1893 when she is listed in the City Directory as a manufacturer of baking powder. In that same year, a sample of her baking powder was displayed in the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. (Pictured left and right.)
While her baking powder manufacturing venture does not seem to have succeeded, she continued to work in the culinary field. After an 1897 divorce, Carrie W. Saunders used the name Carrie Ives Saunders and opened the Saginaw Cooking School in her home at 1611 Court Street – the same home where she had manufactured High Art Baking Powder.
By the early twentieth century, she was a featured lecturer sponsored by Pillsbury Flour Mills. Glowing reviews of her lectures in the Detroit Free Press noted: “Those who know how to make good bread will have reasons to wonder why they have made so many mistakes and failures when the causes were so simple as explained by the lecturer.”
Carrie Ives Saunders passed away suddenly in 1906.
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