Yoder's popular Dutch Mill Bakery closes amid money woes

Art Howsden checked his father, Merle, out of a nursing home Thursday and drove him from Oxford to Yoder to buy sweet rolls at the Dutch Mill Bakery.

After an hour and a half on the road, Howsden pulled his small sedan into the bakery's parking lot, drove up to the door, stared at the small "Closed" sign in the window and assumed it was closed just for an hour or so.

When told the bakery was closed permanently, Howsden couldn't believe it.

"That's why we come up here. To buy lunch and eat cinnamon rolls," he said. "That's too bad.

"We wanted to check out some of the homemade breads they got. You don't get homemade stuff anymore."

Howsden and his dad drove away, and another man drove up in a truck. He jumped out, walked to the front door, stopped and returned to the truck.

"I don't understand," he said. "They had good stuff." He climbed back into his truck and drove off.

So it went at the Dutch Mill Bakery in Yoder on Thursday, cars driving in, then backing out, their drivers puzzled and hungry.

The bakery, owned by David D. Harding of Wichita, had closed Tuesday due to financial reasons. A Wichita bank foreclosed on the business in July and purchased the property late last month for resale.

The closing surprised the town and an ended a tradition that probably meant more to visitors from Wichita and Hutchinson than to local residents.

Located on Yoder Road just north of the K-96 intersection, the Dutch Mill Bakery for 32 years had sold its fresh-baked cakes, cookies, breads and its signature sweet and gooey cinnamon rolls to people driving through on their way to either city.

You can still find some different cinnamon rolls in Yoder. Try the Carriage Crossing Restaurant on one side of the intersection, Yoder Meats and Kansas Station on the other side, or Rose's Pastries about a mile up Yoder Road.

And probably anywhere else in town.

"You can go to any Amish home around here, and they can cook some serious food," said Mike Miller, owner of the Carriage Crossing Restaurant, which was filled Thursday during the final week of the Kansas State Fair in Hutchinson.

But, he said, "I'm sad it closed. We've kind of had a friendly competition between them and us for who had the best rolls, and competition is good. Now we won 't have that."

The bakery's closing was a blow to the 12 or 15 stores in the town trying to hold on through rough economic times. Businesses in Yoder are coping, said Malinda Osborn, owner of Yoder Grocery and Deli on Main Street, but "anytime there's an empty spot in this community, it's always going to affect every single person and business owner in here."

"Those people who stop for Dutch Mill Bakery are also going to carouse around town and look at things. We don't ever like to see empty buildings here," she said.

The town depends on people from Wichita and Hutchinson stopping in to shop and visit. And the bakery helped draw them.

"We may not have patronized them on a daily basis," said Cindy Mastro, owner of Demelia's, a quilt store on Main Street, "but it was always nice to know they were there."

Spangles restaurants in Wichita carried Dutch Mill products for 20 years and they were popular with customers, said co-owner Dale Steven.

Yoder Meats also sold Dutch Mill products. When the goods didn't arrive Tuesday, Kristi Kirkwood, who works the cash register at the Yoder Meats retail store, went to the bakery and saw a locksmith working on the door. That's how she found out it had closed.

"He had some sweet breads. He had his French breads, his rye breads. He had cakes he brought to us on Monday's. So it wasn't just cinnamon rolls," Kirkwood said.

But the rolls were the big attraction, she said.

"Especially right at the Fair time, that's what people come in for, Dutch Mill Bakery cinnamon rolls," she said. "We've had a lot of disappointed people."

This story was originally published September 15, 2011 at 9:50 AM with the headline "Yoder's popular Dutch Mill Bakery closes amid money woes."