A professor, a schoolteacher and a works on the Massachusetts line.

Rumford is an American baking powder sold today by Clabber Girl Corporation of Terre Haute, Indiana, which B&G Foods has owned since 2019. Its name does not come from a founder or from the place it was made. It comes from a professorship. The American Chemical Society, in its history of the product as a National Historic Chemical Landmark, says the chemist Eben Norton Horsford was offered the Rumford chair at Harvard in February 1847, a post founded by a grant from Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. English Wikipedia gives 30 January 1847 as the date Harvard’s governing corporation elected him.

Count Rumford himself was a scientist born in Woburn, Massachusetts, who left America for Britain and later served the Elector of Bavaria, the ACS says. When he was made a count of the Holy Roman Empire he chose his own title, and he took it from Rumford, the name by which Concord, New Hampshire, had been known before 1765. The baking powder carries that name by way of a Bavarian title and a Harvard chair.

The business began as a partnership. According to the ACS, George F. Wilson, a schoolteacher who had left his post as principal of the Chicago Academy, set up a chemical merchandising firm in Providence, Rhode Island, early in 1854, under the name George F. Wilson & Co., supplying the local textile trade. Later that year he approached Horsford, who had just patented a process using calcium sulfite to neutralise chlorine in bleached cotton and linen. The two built a small calcium-sulfite plant at Pleasant Valley, Rhode Island; neighbours complained about the sulfur dioxide it gave off, and in 1856 Wilson moved the equipment to a site he had bought in East Seekonk, Massachusetts.

The company took its formal shape in 1859, when it was incorporated under Massachusetts law as the Rumford Chemical Works; Horsford chose the name, the ACS says, to honour Count Rumford and the chair he held. In 1861 the boundary between Massachusetts and Rhode Island was adjusted, East Seekonk became part of East Providence, Rhode Island, and the corporation had to be chartered again — in 1862, according to English Wikipedia’s article on the works’ historic district. Besides the acid for baking powder, the ACS says, the firm made hydrochloric and nitric acids and tin chloride, and Wilson patented equipment of his own, including a pump for phosphoric acid, in 1868.

Bread Preparation, Yeast Powder and a metal can.

The product grew out of a problem in the kitchen. The ACS history says that by the 1840s bakers were leavening with bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar, a by-product of wine-making imported from France and Italy whose supply and price rose and fell with the grape harvest, and that the two had to be kept apart until use. Horsford proposed replacing the cream of tartar with calcium acid phosphate, which he knew as monocalcium phosphate, and on 26 April 1856 he received a patent for making what he called “pulverulent phosphoric acid.” In the early years, the ACS says, the works made it from animal bones treated with sulfuric acid; phosphate mining replaced the bones in the late 1880s.

The name on the package changed more than once. The works’ early packaged product, the ACS says, was Horsford’s Bread Preparation, measured supplies of the acid and the soda sold together but kept separate. By the mid-1860s a ready-mixed Horsford’s Yeast Powder was on the market, packed in bottles. Horsford wanted to pack it in metal cans, which meant the mixture had to resist moisture, and the answer was corn starch, added to keep the dry acid and soda from reacting early; the ACS dates the start of what it calls true baking powder at the works to 1869. The powder first carried Horsford’s name, the ACS says, and only later became Rumford Baking Powder.

Horsford also wrote about the subject. In 1861, the ACS says, he published The Theory and Art of Breadmaking, and in 1864 he patented a self-rising flour containing calcium acid phosphate and bicarbonate of soda. That was also the year, the ACS adds, that he resigned as dean of Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, as the business prospered; two years later he retired from the Rumford chair.

Recognition came long afterwards. The American Chemical Society designated the development of baking powder a National Historic Chemical Landmark, dedicating it on 12 June 2006 at the Rumford Chemical Works in East Providence and on 27 April 2007 at Clabber Girl’s headquarters in Terre Haute. The plaque says Horsford devised a mixture for baking “which he named ‘yeast powder’ and later called baking powder.”

Part of the East Providence site survives. The Rumford Chemical Works and Mill House Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, English Wikipedia says. The surviving parcel includes wood-frame buildings that may date from the company’s move to the site, a three-storey brick warehouse of 1895 and a row of duplexes built as housing for workers, and the old buildings now hold apartments, a restaurant and a bakery among other businesses.

Design and documentation.

The baking shelf of a grocery store holds a particular kind of product: condensed and evaporated milk in small cans, chocolate chips and baking chocolate in bags and bars, corn starch in a box and baking powder in a tin. They are ingredients rather than finished foods, bought to be measured into something else, and a single can or tin may sit in a kitchen cupboard for months between uses.

That shapes how their packaging works. A name, a colour and a simple device have to be recognised on a crowded shelf, and then again in a cupboard, often by someone following a recipe that names the product. Directions, measurements and recipes printed on the pack are part of the design as well, read in the kitchen with flour on the counter and the oven already warming.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, where it is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Rhode Island name made in Indiana.

Rumford left Rhode Island in the middle of the twentieth century. Hulman & Company, the Terre Haute grocery business that made Clabber Girl, bought the Rumford baking powder business in 1950, according to Clabber Girl’s own timeline, which dates Hulman & Company’s start as a wholesale grocery in Terre Haute to the 1850s. English Wikipedia’s article on the historic district says Hulman acquired the Rumford Chemical Works that year and that the powder is now made at its facility in Terre Haute.

The Hulman family sold the baking business in 2019. On 15 May 2019 B&G Foods, of Parsippany, New Jersey, announced that it had acquired Clabber Girl Corporation from Hulman & Company with effect from that day, listing the Rumford, Davis, Hearth Club and Royal brands of retail baking powder, baking soda and corn starch among the business’s products. Clabber Girl’s website now calls Rumford “another core brand under the Clabber Girl family of baking brands,” and says the company continues to manufacture in Terre Haute, Indiana, its home since the company began.

The company describes today’s product as a “balanced, double-acting” baking powder, and it lists three ingredients: corn starch, sodium bicarbonate and monocalcium phosphate. That is the trio of acid, soda and starch that the ACS history traces to Horsford, who used the name monocalcium phosphate for his acid; the ACS says his powder was sold for decades with the same three ingredients in the same proportions. A reduced-sodium version is also offered, the company says.

For a design guide, Rumford shows how a name borrowed from a professorship can outlast the works that coined it and travel with a product from one state to another. Compare Clabber Girl, the Terre Haute baking powder made by the same company, and Davis, another baking powder in the same family. For this guide we use a chemist red, a navy and a flour cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Rumford’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.