If you haven’t watched the Beier’s building being torn down on River Street and Ottawa Avenue in Dixon, you can visit the Beier Exhibit at Loveland Museum. There you can ring the Beier’s Bakery bell. Its sound is deafening, and the favorite of all young visitors.
The bell was once mounted on the floor of a wagon. As a horse pulled the wagon through Dixon streets, the driver would step on the bell mechanism and ring it, as you can now. At this summons, children ran out to the wagon with nickels to buy loaves of bread for their mothers.
Beier’s Bakery was established in 1869 by Reinhold Beier, a German immigrant. It was in business for 93 years.
Other relics of the large Dixon business may be seen in the museum exhibit. Here is the Beier Bread sign to put in your window if you want the wagon – or later, a truck – to stop to deliver bread to your door. The store operated 11 delivery trucks at one time, and turned out 25,000 loaves of bread and bakery goods daily. “Baked Fine Since ’69” was its slogan.
If you operated a store that carried Beier bread, the company would give you a Beier door handle, also exhibited.
The attractive Beier Bread building was made of ceramic tile with glass brick trim. A specimen was retrieved from the debris just in time last week, and given to the museum by Jon Cecchetti.
Another Beier building still stands farther east on River Road. That building produced Beier bags.
The case containing the Beier exhibit is new to the museum and is a temporary exhibit case. Every few weeks a new exhibit will appear in it. The donation of the case was procured by museum volunteer Roger Taylor.
During the last few weeks, the changing exhibit case has been occupied by an exhibit that was shipped all the way from Hawaii and contained dresses that a young Dixon girl, Janet Sing, wore in the 1940s. Each one framed with matching shoes, they were typical of the day’s styles.
Now, several of the gowns are on permanent exhibit with other toddler apparel and toys.