The Factory That Invented the Cheez-It, and a Lost Corner Restaurant in Its Shadow
Cheez-Its are a popular snack, but most people eating them have no idea where they came from. The answer is a factory on the corner of Cincinnati and Concord Streets in Dayton, Ohio, once surrounded by a dense working-class neighborhood.
It employed generations of workers and still stands today, but the company is long gone, along with most of the world that surrounded it.
The firm that invented the Cheez-It was Green & Green, founded in 1897 by the Green family in Dayton, which was then accelerating its growth as an industrial power.
On March 31, 1921, the company introduced Cheez-It crackers, marketing them as a “baked rarebit,” a reference to a dish of melted cheese over toast. The company had moved to the Edgemont neighborhood in 1907 and expanded significantly by 1926, becoming the largest biscuit bakery in the state of Ohio.
Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company bought Green and Green in 1930, and that company became the Sunshine Biscuit Company, remaining at the corner of Cincinnati and Concord until at least 1972.
Edgemont itself developed in the latter half of the 19th century as what residents called an “industrial suburb,” a dense neighborhood of workers and their families who had come to find employment in its factories. German and Italian immigrants settled here, with St. Elizabeth Hospital serving as one of the neighborhood’s civic anchors. After World War II the neighborhood became predominantly African-American.
In a 1957 photograph of that corner, the Sunshine Grill cafeteria is visible at 701 Cincinnati Street, with the massive Sunshine Biscuit Company looming directly behind it.
It is the kind of building that appears in thousands of industrial neighborhoods across the country: small-scale, street-facing, built for daily use rather than architectural distinction, and entirely dependent on the economic life around it.
The workers who filed in and out of the biscuit factory each day made up its customers and its reason for existing, complemented by the residents who lived nearby in the closely-knit neighborhood.
But by the later decades of the 20th century, Edgemont’s industry had largely departed. The Sunshine Biscuit Company operated on the site until the 1970s.
Freeways bisected the neighborhood, and the dense residential and commercial fabric that once surrounded that corner has been reduced to scattered remnants. The restaurant is long gone.
As for the Cheez-It brand, it passed through Keebler to Kellogg’s and eventually to Kellanova, now owned by Mars, selling billions of crackers a year while the Dayton factory where it began still stand but continues to deteriorate, being named as one of Dayton’s worst eyesores.
A recent campaign to add an official Ohio Historical Marker to the factory site, however, is helping to commemorate the history that had largely been forgotten.
Source:
- Dayton Daily News, “Were Cheez-Its really invented in Dayton?” https://www.daytondailynews.com/what-to-love/were-cheez-its-really-invented-in-dayton-yes-and-heres-the-story/EGFTZDIVG7VN42KUV5DBBF5WVE/
- Wikipedia, “Cheez-It,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheez-It
- Edgemont history, Dayton Vistas
- Images: Dayton History Books Online / Dayton Metro Library
