All about The Lazy Antelope

Welcome to The Lazy Antelope, home of The Living Crumb—a bakery and living history project built around a 400-year-old sourdough starter.

Our story begins in the early autumn of 1628, when the immigrant ship Abigail dropped anchor in Salem, Massachusetts. Onboard was the colony’s new governor, John Endecott, which later married the maternal foundation of our family line. In those early colonial kitchens, our ancestors captured wild yeasts from the brisk New England air. They created a bubbling crock of sourdough starter that would become the ultimate living witness to American history.

Passed down from mother to daughter through an unbroken chain of matriarchs, this heirloom culture survived the Salem Witch Trials under Mary Smith Endecott. It traveled south via saddlebag into the Quaker communities of New Jersey with Hannah Jenkins Endecott in 1698. For over two centuries, through the Revolutionary War and the industrialization of the Mid-Atlantic, the women of the Endicott line fed and nurtured this culture week after week.

In 1913, the crock passed to Agnes Mae Endicott. Her marriage into the Windish family merged this ancient New England yeast with the deep baking traditions of the incoming Post and Baugh matriarchs. In the mid-20th century, the culture migrated to the Piedmont region of Lexington, North Carolina, with Jeanette Lulu Johnson, before her daughter, Diane Ellen Coker, brought it to Riverside California in 1968.

The starter made one final grand leap from the Pacific coast when Diane's daughter, Lisa Ann Wertz,  born in Riverside, California migrated back east to Des Moines, Iowa.

At The Lazy Antelope, we do not just bake bread; we wake up history. Every time we feed our starter, we are reviving the exact same biological organism nurtured by the very first governors of America.