In the mid-19th century, some 400,000 people traversed the Oregon Trail to settle in the American west. Given that this migration occurred nearly two centuries ago, none of the settlers who made the journey are alive today — but something belonging to them purportedly is.
A sourdough starter believed to date back to an 1847 trek on the famed passage is still thriving, and the touching story behind it has been making the rounds on social media in recent years. For the uninitiated, starters are fermented cultures of flour and water teeming with the wild yeast and bacteria that give sourdough loaves their unique tang. They’re kept “alive” through a system of careful feeding and discarding, and many families pass theirs down through generations.
For decades, the starter in question was tended to by an Oregon man named Carl Griffith, the great-grandson of the woman said to have created it. Griffith took pleasure in sharing the mixture with bakers far and wide, mailing dried samples of it to anyone who sent him a stamped envelope — a fair number of whom found him via an internet forum for bread makers in the 1990s.
Emigrants on the Oregon Trail circa 1850, identities unknown
“All I know is that it started west in 1847 from Missouri. I would guess with the family of Dr. John Savage as one of his daughters (my great-grandmother) was the cook,” Griffith explained in a 1996 brochure he wrote about the starter. “It came on West and settled near Salem, Oregon.” He learned to bake with it at age 10, using a Dutch oven placed in a hole in the ground when his family was homesteading in a Basque sheep camp on Steens Mountain.
His ancestors on the 2,170-mile Oregon Trail may have baked their bread in a similar fashion, in a Dutch oven hung over a campfire or buried with hot coals. Though emigrants making the journey relied on hunting and foraging, it was common to have set out with large stores of flour.
When Griffith died in 2000 at age 80, his forum pals banded together to keep his starter — and his legacy — alive. Calling themselves “Carl’s Friends,” they formed The 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Preservation Society and began fielding requests. A woman named Mary Buckingham volunteered to manage a P.O. box where eager bakers sent their stamped envelopes, while another member of the network, a “grower,” packaged small portions of the dehydrated starter and mailed them out.
“We make every effort to keep this starter ‘pure.’ Our growers and keepers only have Carl’s starter in their home so we don’t get microorganisms from other starters accidentally mixed in,” the society website explains. “They use sanitary (but not sterile procedures) to keep it healthy. This is a lot cleaner than Carl’s ancestors could possibly have been in 1847 when they took it on the Oregon Trail migration.”
This went on for over two decades, news of the starter spreading mostly by word of mouth, either online or in person, Buckingham previously told The Denver Post. “I even got a request from Ukraine in 2022 right before the attack (by Russian troops), some person in Kyiv,” she said.
Then, in early 2024, a TikTok post about the society went viral, and suddenly, Buckingham was getting over 1,000 requests per week for Griffith’s starter. Hordes of people wanted to bake with a piece of history — particularly since it was known for producing an appealing loaf.
“It’s strong, it’s stable. It raises bread very nicely, and it’s everything you want in a starter,” Buckingham shared. The group decided that, while they’d prioritize requests that included a donation, they wouldn’t charge anyone. “It was about continuing the old pioneer tradition of giving whoever wanted it sourdough because it’s food,” she said. “Especially back in the day, bread was everything.”
Eventually, however, the volume of mail became too much to handle: The society was forced to stop fulfilling requests, and it is currently not accepting new ones. Since 2000, an incredible 100,000-plus starter baggies have been distributed, the website states.
Still, the legacy of the family starter lives on, and posts about the way Carl’s Friends came together to preserve Griffith’s passion project continue to proliferate. The society offers helpful resources about sourdough baking, including several recipes that his circle of friends have used the starter in over the years.
Inspired to start your own sourdough journey? Read our guide.
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