“Passing the St. Laurent Brothers's torch to Jordan was great for me. He'll learn something new every day, and the people in this area want to support St. Laurent and keep it part of the downtown tradition. He'll see familiar faces all year long, a lot of repeat customers who keep coming back. I'm sure he'll steer the ship properly and be successful.”
– Steve Frye, previous owner of St. Laurent Brothers in Bay City
“It's been a great learning experience, and like Steve said, I’m learning something new all the time. It's been very challenging, but the public support has been great and we have wonderful employees who care about the business. Some of them have been here for many years and other members of their family work here, too. That's been very encouraging and we definitely a great team.
I like the idea of leaving things as they have been, but also bringing a little bit of technology in to help us to grow a little. I’ve always had an appreciation for history. I was fascinated with all the old machinery and how many historic things were here. I like looking at how the prior owners operated the business. They have good principles of operation that have led this business for many years, so I have definitely reflected on that and just tried to take it all in.”
– Jordan Dice, current owner of St. Laurent Brothers in Bay City
“I'm very happy to own a business like St. Laurent Brothers. The history of the business is paramount to me and is a big thing I wanted to preserve. Not many businesses make it 120 years! We will have our 120th anniversary on December 8th of this year, so I'm very honored to own it at that milestone and we'll do something big for the anniversary.
There were the first two generations with the family that founded it, then Steve and his partners, and now on to me. The public support has been wonderful and it’s so encouraging to see how many people in the community care about this business and its history. I've heard from so many people saying that their grandparents or great grandparents worked here back in the day, and there are families that still have someone working here today, even generations later.
It's been fun diving into the business and learning it all. We have a great staff here, and some of them have been here for 20 plus years, so they know what they’re doing. They all were very happy to see the business preserved and have someone local buy it.
A lot of people were afraid it would get turned into condominiums, or at least upper floors would. But after looking at it myself, we have a lot of square footage here, about 21,000 square feet and I can envision using it all in production or for a larger retail store, especially as I proceed with opening another St. Laurent Brothers store in the Midland Mall. We're going to need more production for that, as well as more room for inventory and storage. The amount of space we have there is great, and I think we'll be able to put it to great use.”
– Jordan Dice, owner of St. Laurent Brothers in Bay City
“The nut roaster we use for the peanut butter is a 1950s roaster. We also have the original roaster from about 1910. The St. Laurent Brothers started in 1904 in the back of their father's grocery store, which was right around the corner on First and Saginaw, where the bowling alley is now. When they outgrew that, they acquired this building and moved here, and my understanding is the nut roaster here was moved into the location, so this is the oldest piece of equipment we have. From what I understand it still works, but it's not very efficient. It has a four-foot pilot on it, which is the largest pilot I've ever seen, so it would be very dangerous—they didn't build for safety back then!
We've talked about having Steve Frye, the previous owner, come back and help us fire it up just to see it going. We've talked about doing a little museum here, because there's so many antiques around here. Not all of it is still in use, but what's nice is even as they retired equipment, they just left it around. There's a lot of old equipment that's not used, but it's still here, so it would make a perfect museum setting. We've talked about having a part of the building where the public would be able to see more of the items that have carried the business for so many years.
The roaster we use now for our peanut butter is from the 1950s. Everything gets roasted in there and then the peanuts go into a cooling tower and onto conveyor belts. That's where the nuts get blanched, picked out, ground and turned into peanut butter—a few hundred pounds at a time.
We have four different types of peanut butter: we make smooth and crunchy and with salt and without. We do four different sizes, as well. We have the normal jars, which are 17 ounces, then have three and five pound pails. We also have 40 pound pails, which are basically five-gallon buckets of peanut butter. Those are mostly sold in our wholesale business, and some of the other businesses around here will buy them in the 40-pound pails.
When I first came to St. Laurent Brothers, I had never smelled peanut butter like that before, and it's a wonderful smell! The peanut butter is so good that we'd like to increase production, but the recipe will stay the same: the same recipe since the business was founded 120 years ago. It's a very simple recipe but it’s still top secret, though. It's pretty straightforward and one of the most natural peanut butters around.”
– Jordan Dice, owner of St. Laurent Brothers in Bay City
“There is a fair amount of history to the building, even before the St. Laurent Brothers bought it in 1917. The property goes back to Fitzhugh, one of the founding fathers of Bay City. This corner was where he built one of his first houses in 1865. It was built by McDowell and Park, who was a wholesale wine distributor. McDowell died about five years into it and then Park sold the building off. That's when it became the saloons and the hotel. It was known as the Steamboat Saloon throughout the 1870s and 80s. The New European Hotel opened on the third floor here in the 1890s, and was the center of Hell’s Half Mile.
The building actually burned down in 1890, and the hotel actually rebuilt it. These old columns are still here from the hotel when it was on the third floor. It had very small rooms, what we would consider the size of a closet today and they had around 20 rooms on this level. There's not a whole lot of room, but they managed to fit an awful lot of rooms up here back then. It was just a little place to sleep and that was it. You can see the old windows, even though the building is covered in red steel, the original building is beneath that steel.
That steel was all put on in a modernization they did in 1976 and was the thing of the time. They were getting away from the look of old buildings, similar to what they did to The Legacy Building prior to it being restored recently. Now you see a lot of people want to go back to the historical look and quite frankly, that's something I'll be looking into. Could we bring the original look of the building back out? If you look in pictures from 50 or more years ago, it is a very nice-looking building with all the brick and the design. It's all still there, it’s just covered up with the steel.A lot of the foundation and some of the original structure may date back to 1865. The hotel went out of business around 1900, and it became a church mission known as the Bethel House for a period of time. They used many of the hotel rooms to put up people in need. In 1917, the St. Laurent Brothers came here and acquired it, moving their business from their father's grocery store to here.
Our inventory room is where you can see some evidence of the old tunnels. The underground city used to come through this basement. Back in the day, all of these old buildings in Bay City were all connected together by tunnels and you could walk for miles. The room connects to the parking lot of where Drift is now. There's an entire room under there where they used to do gambling and other things. There was a tunnel leading back to the building and it would have probably connected right through there and continued down the road. A lot of those tunnels obviously were used during the Prohibition era, as people were trying to be able to disappear out of sight. So, there is a lot of history in the underground city.
From my understanding, the tunnels even proceeded down Center Avenue and over towards Madison and Washington. I've heard stories that some of the houses along Center Avenue would have a private entrances into these tunnels for people to go back and forth between the city.”
– Jordan Dice, owner of St. Laurent Brothers in Bay City
