Chuck Conway and Carla Kevorkian husband and wife proprietors of O Bread. Photo by Jonathan Hillyer

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by Lin Stone

The owners of Shelburne's O Bread Bakery, Chuck Conway and Carla Kevorkian, have been pioneers in Vermont's artisan bread revolution since the mid 1970s, although the couple's initial route north was circuitous.

High school sweethearts from Granby Conn., the duo left college in the fall of 1973 and headed south. Chuck took up residence in a little adobe house in a small town in Mexico. This began his first bread baking enterprise, pulling loaves out of the oven, three at a time, and selling the bread to "gringos" who found his house on a map marked with an X. Then, at the insistence of "some French guy," he made other breads and added, "Olives, more olives."  

Although mostly self taught, the couple liked the idea of baking European-style breads. They heard about a great Belgian Bakery and pooled their resources to take advantage of an opportunity to go and study with the bakers there. "We thought, if we can make bread just half as good as this it will be gratifying. It was a little tough though when we first came back and introduced our crusty chewy breads sold in brown paper bags. People were used to squishy Wonder bread wrapped in plastic," commented Chuck. 

Later, the couple moved back to the states and set up shop for a few years selling their breads in Warren, at the Burlington Farmers Market, and food cooperatives. However, Warren's business proved relatively seasonal and they decided to move to the Burlington area to live and develop a year round business. "We wanted to put bread in the hands of people we would see, again and again. We wanted to see repeat customers—not just subsist on one-time buys from tourists," said Chuck. 

"We were thinking of opening a little café and bakery in downtown Burlington and found a little basement space under Bennington Potters. We were going to share it with these two guys who weren't quite sure what they were going to do - maybe make candy or ice cream or something. But the deal fell through when they decided to rent the gas station on the corner of St. Paul and College Streets instead. They ended up making and selling their own ice cream...you remember them, don't you? Jerry and Ben," he chuckled.

 "Next we met some other really nice people at the Burlington farmers market who suggested we go down to look at their farm in Shelburne and consider baking our bread in one of their barns. At first, we couldn't find the farmhouse, but we bumped into one of the family members downtown, Marilyn, and she took us there. We were a little surprised when we first saw it...Shelburne Farms.

"We made a plan, wrote a proposal, and we moved. Happily, we've been here ever since.

 "At first, we did it all. Some wheat was grown on the farm then. We would dry the wheat and put it in tin-lined grain bins. Every morning someone would climb up and fill a bag with wheat, throw the bag in a truck, bring it to the bakery where we would clean the wheat—sift the wheat from the chaff—mill the wheat into flour, and then, we'd begin to make the bread. It was a lot of work and a lot of noise before you could even start baking. Although we don't grow the wheat or mill the flour here anymore, there is now an exciting trend: more and more Vermont farmers grow wheat, successfully. There also is some talk about opening up a local milling operation. Closing that circle locally would be very exciting!" he concluded.

  Thanks to the couple's dedication and decades of very early mornings with floury hands, local residents have access to world class and very, very good artisan breads: O Bread and O My.