A corner at the edge of Sinclair Community College’s campus has seen radical changes over time, from a mansion belonging to a little-known inventor to a large apartment building that featured a popular restaurant and local brand of candy, before it and the whole area around it was demolished in the 1960s.
The southwest corner of Third and Perry originally featured the luxurious home of I. L. Baker. Baker isn’t often cited as one of Dayton’s prominent innovators, but was an early inventor of machines for making popcorn balls.
In 1898 he “expended over ten thousand dollars in developing a new method of putting up his loaf sugar-dripped popcorn, which excels every known popcorn confection ever offered to the public.”
A newspaper article from 1898 called Baker “the Exposition popcorn king.”
His major annual destinations included Pittsburgh, where he had enjoyed “the candy and popcorn privileges at the annual exhibition” since 1875, and St. Louis where he held a similar status.
Baker partnered on making “ice cream candy and popcorn balls for expositions and exhibition halls” with L. F. Clevinger, who had a long candy making career of his own, working first for a firm that was sold and became the Underwood-Talmage Co. That company became the largest candy-making firm in Dayton and occupied the old warehouse at 620 Geyer Street which recently went up for auction.
Baker’s home at Third and Perry was razed in the 1920s and the the Maud Muller Apartments were built on the site.
That was a well known name in town for the Maud Muller restaurant which was located here, and the new building even provided a link back to the candy-making legacy of I. L. Baker as it was one of a few local sites to buy the popular Maud Muller brand of candy.
The Maud Muller apartment building was razed in 1965, and the Sinclair Community College campus would be built a few years later and open in 1972.
This block actually stayed a parking lot for many more years, and the structure we see here, Building 12 (also known as the David H. Ponitz Center and the Sinclair Conference Center), opened in 1989.
Sources
Personal Mention, Dayton Herald, 8/21/1899
Dayton Herald, 11/23/1898
Old Santa’s Aide, Dayton Daily News, 12/13/1925
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