‘Home Of Sliced Bread’: A Small Missouri Town Champions Its Greatest Thing (Video)

 Missouri lawmakers are considering whether to mark an official day to celebrate sliced bread. KCTV5 has more:

U.S. Route 36 stretches for 200 miles across the flat farmland of northern Missouri, connecting Kansas to Illinois. At one end is the Pony Express Bridge in St. Joseph and at the other is the Mark Twain Memorial Bridge in Hannibal.

The route is called “The Way of American Genius” because some of the nation’s best-known innovators, creative minds and a military hero spent parts of their childhood near towns along the route, including Samuel Clemens, a.k.a Mark Twain (Hannibal), Walt Disney (Marceline), Gen. John J. Pershing (Laclede) and James Cash “J. C.” Penney (Hamilton).

For ages, Chillicothe, a town of 9,500 along the route, felt left out. As far as anyone knew, nothing had been invented there of equal stature.

Then, in 2001, a local journalist, combing through microfilm of old newspapers, stumbled upon a slice of American innovation long overlooked by local residents and state historians. The headline on an old news clipping said: “SLICED BREAD IS MADE HERE.”

It appeared on the front page of the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune on July 6, 1928, the day before the first machine-sliced bread would be sold to customers. “The Chillicothe Baking Company,” it said, “has installed a power driven multi-bladed bread slicer which performs a feat which heretofore had been considered by bakers as being impossible — namely, the slicing of loaves.”