Trenary Toast has long, loyal Up North following It's nothing more than dry toast. But it's been loved in the U.P. for years.

John Carlisle | Detroit Free Press

Show Caption Hide Caption Trenary Toast has long, loyal Up North following Trenary Toast has a long, loyal Upper Peninsula following. It might be nothing more than toast. But it's been loved in the U.P. for years.

TRENARY — It’s just toast. It’s dry and hard. And it’s sold in a plain brown paper bag.

Yet, it’s been incredibly popular for years in the Upper Peninsula.

Trenary Toast, as it’s called, has lasted 87 years, baked using the same recipe, sold in the same plain bag, dusted with the same cinnamon sugar topping as it always was. About 215,000 bags are sold at more than 200 stores and restaurants in the U.P. every year, or shipped by mail to ex-pat Yoopers all over the country who crave a memory of home. There’s even a couple of bed and breakfasts Up North that actually leave a bag of the toast on the pillows in the rooms instead of a chocolate. And it’s hard to find a Yooper who didn’t grow up on the stuff.

“I can’t tell you how many people tell me that they ate Trenary Toast before they had teeth. They literally teethed on it,” said Andy Reichert, the 50-year-old owner of Trenary Home Bakery, the maker of the famous toast.

It might seem puzzling why dry sugar toast is so popular, but the key is to dip it in coffee, which unlocks a whole other world of flavor. Dunking Trenary Toast in coffee or breaking it up in a bowl of milk is a longstanding tradition here, started by the Finns who flooded the area looking for work a century ago and brought with them their taste for thick, hard, toasted bread. “Dunk, eat, repeat” became a motto.

It’s just toast. But its enduring popularity is a glimpse into U.P. culture, and embodies the history of the town it comes from, and by extension the whole region.

“In the U.P., everywhere has it, everyone has it at their house,” said Michelle Cherland, 32, who grew up in Marquette. “It’s like a normal breakfast food — I want cereal, I want oatmeal, I want Trenary Toast. It’s the best toast on earth.”

Small-town roots

Its name comes from the name of its hometown, whose name comes from Levi Trenary, a homesteader who made his way from Indiana in 1886 and thought the middle of unsettled nowhere was a great place to build a house.

He went out to buy a horse one day and came back to find the house burned down. He just built another one. Others were drawn to this man’s persistence, joined him at this small clearing in the middle of the woods and a town was slowly formed.

He earned the right to have it named after him — he worked as its blacksmith, built and ran its sawmill, served sometimes as its postmaster, officiated at town funerals and held Sunday school in his home.

For years, Trenary was in a logging area, and the population grew to nearly 3,000 at its peak. But like a lot of small rural towns in the Upper Peninsula whose fortunes were based on logging or mining, its glory days came and went decades ago.

What’s left is a feed mill, a grocery store and a gas station. Two bars and three churches. A downtown frozen in time. And the old bakery, still going.

“It’s a declining town,” said Randy Stine, 65, who grew up here and lives just down the road from the bakery. “There are businesses that used to be here that are no longer here. The young people, there’s nothing for the young people anymore. They grow up and they move away. They can’t live in a dying town and expect to survive.”

The population was 944 in 2000, 816 in 2010. Some say it’s far less now.

“There’s 200 people here on a good day, and it might be 180 if you throw out some of the chickens and cattle,” Reichert said. “The average age gets older and older, and the number of kids each year gets fewer and fewer, the class sizes get smaller and smaller.”

Tony Stone, the baker at Trenary Home Bakery, grew up in a little house across the street and came to work here six years ago when he was visiting to fix the bakery’s computer and was offered a job making the famous toast.

“The town’s dying,” said Tony Stone, 49. “It’s shrinking, aging. But that’s all small towns. It’s natural. We lost our school. Once a town loses its school it’s on its way down.”

In 2002, a retired local schoolteacher launched an effort to beautify Trenary by enlisting local young artists to create colorful paintings and murals on the sun-bleached wood walls of the empty old buildings downtown.

Now, a massive painting of a rooster crowing at the sunrise greets the town every day with a “Good Morning Trenary!” from the walls of an old general store. Murals on a shell of a main-street barn depict the town’s logging history. Antique signs from roads and gas stations cover the gray tin walls of another.

These days the town is most famous for its Trenary Outhouse Classic, which draws thousands of visitors in the dead of February to a tailgate-style outdoor party to watch teams drag outhouses down the snowy main street in a race.

Otherwise it’s usually quiet, except for someone driving through town on their way somewhere else, or a logging truck passing through, or tourists who make a point to stop at the Trenary Home Bakery, the shrine of cinnamon toast.

But despite a long slow fade over time, it’s still home for those who haven’t left.

“Even if it’s gone I’ll still be here,” said Stone, who’s spent his life here. “I’m not going anywhere.”

A taste of history

Trenary Toast is essentially rusk, a twice-baked bread popular as far back as the Middle Ages and often sprinkled with cinnamon for its preservative and antibacterial properties. It became a staple because it could be stored so long.

When Finns began migrating to the Upper Peninsula to find work in the mines a century ago, they brought the traditional snack with them.

“I’m told back in the '20s, '30s, '40s, here in the Upper Peninsula, everywhere you went there was cinnamon toast,” Reichert said. “Grandmothers made it off their back stoop and sold it to churches, American Legion halls, grocery stores and so on.”

There was such demand that a local Finnish family opened the bakery in 1928 just to make the toast.

The town’s history can be traced through the bakery’s name alone. Back then, with few signposts or roads, people gave directions by the names of the farms, like Trenary Home, which simply meant the home farm of the man named Trenary. So when the bakery was built at the edge of his farm in 1928, it made sense to call it Trenary Home Bakery, so people would know right away where to find it.

The bakery’s founders ran it for 20 years, another Finnish family who bought it from them ran it for 60, and a new owner held it for couple years before Reichert moved to town and bought it last summer.

A native of Colorado, he was an engineer in the Army reserves who’s already served three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he was deployed for such long stretches of time that he moved with his wife, Nicole, to the Upper Peninsula, where she grew up, so she could be near family when he was away.

Despite its remoteness, he fell in love with the region.

“You get up here and you think these people must be half hermit or whatever, but far from it,” he said. “These folks are incredibly social. I think it’s a lot harder to move into a metropolitan area and make friends than it is up here. Here you got friends coming out of your ears.”

He searched for a business for sale and found the bakery, which came with a long history and an incredible amount of affection from Yoopers. With 23 people working there, it’s the largest employer in town.

He barely changed a thing. Especially not the toast, which sells for around $5 per bag of 16 slices or so, depending where you find it.

“It’s been here 87 years, it’s part of Trenary, it’s part of the Upper Peninsula, so yeah, I feel a huge obligation to carry on,” he said.

“We don’t want to scuttle anything that’s worked well in the past and we only want to build on that and innovate in ways that honor the predecessors that have owned the building, the business, the bakery, and keep moving forward.”

Fond memories

Bill Austin grew up in a small Upper Peninsula town called Atlantic Mine. His father was a miner. And he grew up eating Trenary Toast.

Years ago the family moved south to Walled Lake, when Bill was in middle school, and the family found much to their happiness that a local party store sometimes imported a few bags of Trenary Toast from the Upper Peninsula. And when Bill had a family of his own, his kids grew up eating it, too.

“I just love it,” said his daughter Shari, 54. “It’s the simpleness of it. It’s a local bakery and family owned. The U.P. is a simpler way of life and once they like something, like the pasties, they stick with it and it becomes a tradition and it’s passed down through the families. My parents always had it in the house. All our life we grew up on the toast.”

Whenever they went Up North they brought back bags of it, and visitors to Walled Lake from the Upper Peninsula were reminded to bring some toast with them.

When Bill died in October, the family took his ashes on a tour of his favorite places in the Upper Peninsula, the land he left but always thought of as home, and sprinkled his ashes in locations that meant something to him. They went to Atlantic Mine. Lehto’s Pasties in St. Ignace. The town of Christmas. And they made a stop at the Trenary Home Bakery and left a little part of him there.

This is how much Trenary Toast means to many people from the U.P. Somehow, this little dry bread became connected to a lot of people’s fondest memories.

“I think it’s because it’s something that’s consumed in a nice environment,” Reichert said. “You sit down, you collect your thoughts, you introspect, have your morning coffee or afternoon tea and have your toast, or you have people around you, and you have dunks together. It’s something you’re doing. You’re carving a moment out of your day to enjoy some time. And the toast is a companion to that moment.”

Inside the bakery’s little café, there’s a photo of the Trenary Comets Little League team, sponsored by the Trenary Lions Club, taken 50 years ago, now hanging by the front door. A portrait of Abraham Lincoln that hung inside Trenary High School before it closed now has a home above the front window. The original sign for the town’s train depot hangs above the hallway.

The history of the town is embodied not just in simple pieces of toast, but it’s also celebrated in the building where the toast is still made. And Reichert tries to honor that history.

“I see myself here really as a caretaker, here for a short time,” he said. “You know, I can’t run a bakery forever, so for the 10, 20, 30, 40 years that I’m gifted to be able to run it, and pass it along to the next someone to run it, it’s fun. It is a mission.”

John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle.

Trenary Toast is located at E2918 Highway M-67, Trenary, MI. For more information call 906-446-3330 or go to trenarytoast.us