The rolls barely hit the kitchen table before they’re snatched up and devoured. They’re just out of the oven and piping hot, the soft yeast dough wrapped around bite-size pork sausages, all nestled together in the pan.
They’re made by hand, but not these hands. All I did was throw them in the oven. Instead, they follow the venerable Southern tradition of biscuits and rolls fresh out of the freezer.
The sausage rolls — now just a few crumbs left in the pan — are the handiwork of Belle’s Baking Co., an upstart company with a long history. Belle’s co-founder Stewart Thames is not only an alum of the Marshall Biscuit Company but also a great-grandson of Gordon Smith, the founder of Mobile institution Smith’s Bakery.
To really understand everything that has gone into this particular pan of rolls, you must trace a line in the flour all the way back to July 30, 1899, when Thames’ great-grandfather first arrived in Mobile.
“Baking is my Gospel”
Gordon Smith came up in New Orleans, where he worked with his father in — what else? — a bakery. As he recounted in a 1953 Kiwanis Club address titled “Baking is my Gospel,” he fell in love with Mobile the moment he arrived.
“At that time,” he wrote, “Mobile, while a beautiful city, was a very small city indeed… There wasn’t a paved street in the town. When I came here, they were just putting in sanitary sewers and a waterworks. Dauphin Street was a mud street with a one-track trolley line with switchbacks at various points. Mobile had just gotten over a yellow fever epidemic and things were pretty bad, except for the spirit of the people.”
Smith had come to Alabama with 80 cents in his pocket to work for R.O. Harris, who owned a bakery and grocery. He arrived on a Sunday and went to work at 4 a.m. the next day, operating out of a small wood bakery with one brick oven. Six months later, he bought the bakery from Harris for $2,500, and Smith’s Bakery was born.
It was the heyday of the neighborhood bakery. At the time of Smith’s founding, there were 33 bakeries in Mobile, according to company literature from the ’60s. Smith and four employees would bake about 1,000 loaves per day and deliver them in a horse-drawn cart and two wheelbarrows.
Two years after Smith’s founding, his bakery burned to the ground. As he remembered in “Baking is my Gospel,” he was awakened early in the morning and stood looking on with one of his fellow workers, George Goetz, who remarked that it looked like they were out of a job. But Smith was undeterred. He’d heard that a Mr. Hamil down the street wanted to sell his bakery.
“We walked down there and saw Mr. Hamil at 6 o’clock in the morning; made the deal for his bakery then and there; moved in that same day; took charge and kept the business going as if nothing had happened,” he wrote. “We moved upstairs over the bakery and on March 17 — three days after the fire — my daughter Mary was born there.”
Over time, Smith’s Bakery grew. In 1930, it became the first bakery in Mobile to sell sliced bread. A 1947 company pamphlet includes the charming detail that “at first it was skeptically received by the public, which is sometimes wary of departures from things to which it has long been accustomed.”
In 1948, Smith’s became a member of Quality Bakers of America, a nationwide co-op that produced Sunbeam Bread. At its height, Smith’s had plants in Mobile, Hattiesburg, Meridian and Pensacola.
A Good Rise, and then Collapse
This is the legacy that Stewart Thames was born into. He started working at Smith’s when he was 14; by the time he graduated from high school, he was running bread routes. Eventually, he became a plant manager.
But just as Thames inherited the rise of his great-grandfather’s business, so too did he inherit its decline. In the latter half of the 20th century, bakeries around the country began to consolidate, and time-honored recipes were tweaked to maximize profit and extend products’ shelf lives. Smith’s got caught up in all that progress.
So it came as something of a relief when Robbie Outlaw and Harris Morrisette offered Thames a job at Marshall Biscuit Co. Thames’ team at Marshall’s had a mandate to keep preservatives out of the mix. They spent five years perfecting an old-fashioned roll formula, a deceptively simple combination of flour, sugar, shortening, eggs, yeast and salt.
Marshall’s eventually followed Smith’s down the road of consolidation and closure at the hands of baking giant T. Marzetti, but the painstakingly crafted formulas and years of experience remained with Thames ever since.
A Small-Batch Start
In the spring of 2023, Thames’ career had veered away from baking for the first time in his life. He wasn’t happy about it. His old friend Mark came over to his house one day and asked Thames to share the story of his family’s baking legacy. He thought he was going to get a quick summary, but Thames lit up as he narrated the whole family history from start to finish.
The next day, Mark called him and suggested they bake something together, just for fun. Mark is not a baker, but as Thames got out a bowl and mixed up a few pans of rolls or biscuits (he forgets which) it occurred to Mark that getting Thames into the kitchen might be the key to pulling him out of the doldrums. What’s more, he thought, it could make a viable business.
That kicked off a weekend hobby. They made the habit of giving away biscuits and rolls to friends and family; they also took a couple dozen pans to parties. It went so well that, in the autumn of 2024, they decided to start selling.
Not wanting to put the cart before the horse, they kept the operation small, working out of a borrowed commercial kitchen and setting up freezers at the Spring Hill Ace Hardware (of all places), as well as at Jus Do, a shop up in Brewton.
At first, they weren’t sure if their family was taking pity on them, buying up all their product. When they realized that Mom didn’t have 10 pans socked away in her freezer, they knew they had a genuine word-of-mouth following on their hands. Sales kept ticking up and up.
Since last summer, they’ve been busy renovating an old barber shop in Chickasaw, hauling out the ancient Coke machine and moving in a pair of heavy-duty ovens, with room to fit two more if demand warrants it. This slim building will be the first official headquarters of Belle’s Baking Co., giving them the capacity to start selling their baked goods over the Bay and up I-65.
That’s the goal, anyway. With long careers already at their backs, they’re hoping for one more chapter: a chance to spread this salt-of-the-earth goodness to more people, to fill their days with rewarding, hard work and to carry forward a family legacy that began more than 100 years ago.
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