When William P. Walsh built his baking company at 400 North Main Street in 1910, Evansville’s city directory listed thirty bakers and five wholesale bakeries that served a population of about 86,000. The business was prosperous from the start, as the numerous horse-drawn delivery vehicles indicate. Saso Bread was the company’s chief product, and a local newspaper reported that the demand for it had “grown phenomenally,†necessitating an addition to the factory shortly after it opened. In that decade, Walsh baked about 18,000 loaves of bread a day. Despite its early success, the company succumbed to the Great Depression in the 1930s, when many businesses closed; the building was razed in 2002 to make way for Turoni’s parking lot.
