STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Connie Fawcett never learned how to bake as a child, despite growing up in a Mennonite family in North Dakota.

After all, who needs to learn to bake when you have five older sisters taking on the cooking chores.

But, as she began to have her own children, she began fishing for a way to make money. And, like Little Jack Horner, she landed on pies and pulled out a plum.

Being a novice, she used her own five children as guinea pigs to decide what was too sweet and what was too sour. And, eventually, she had amassed 20 flavors, including marionberry, strawberry rhubarb, cherry, raspberry, peach and apple.

Many of those have found their way into tummies around the Wood River Valley. After all, Fawcett and her Brick Oven Bakery pies have been a fixture at farmer’s markets in the Wood River Valley for 38 years.

But that’s about to come to an end as she will sell her last pie at the Ketchum’s Farmer’s Market when it comes to an end for the 2022 season in September. Then, she’ll hang up her apron, and she and her husband—her chief dough maker—will hit the road on all the summer vacations she was never able to take.

“It’s been so hard thinking that it’s about to come to an end,” she said. “If I could, I would never quit. But my body says, ‘I’m tired.’ ”

Indeed, pie baking Fawcett-style is most definitely a chore. When she first started, she would begin to roll out the dough at 8:30 in the morning and pull the last pie out of the oven between 9:30 and 11 p.m. By the time they were cool enough to box, it was close to midnight.

She could make only six pies at a time, or 60 a day, which she trucked off to the Farmer’s Market at Hop Porter Park in Hailey, finally expanding to the Capital City Public Market and Boise Farmers Market.

“It got to the point the people at the end of the line didn’t get pie. I decided I had to quit or make more because it was not fair to those waiting in line,” she said.

So, Fawcett enlisted the aid of two daughters, a daughter-in-law, her daughter-in-law’s sister and a friend. They settled into an assembly line, with two rolling out the dough, one weighing the fruit, another weighing the cream and sugar and still another doing the crimping.

Her husband has been the master dough maker.

“He’s the best. He’s had the experience, the hands, to know just how much to mix,” she said.

Fawcett was one of the original vendors at the Ketchum’s Farmer’s Market when it started in 1999.

“Carol Rast of Prairie Sun Farm and Nate Jones of Kings Crown Organic Farm are the only other original vendors now taking part,” she said, looking at her compadres across the Lower River Run parking lot where the Ketchum Farmer’s Market takes place Tuesday afternoons.

At one point, Fawcett was selling more than 300 pies at the Ketchum Market, 150 in Hailey, 65 pies in Boise and around 250 fruit turnovers at each market.

“We did this for a number of years until we felt we need to stop going to the Boise and Hailey markets as the work load became too much,” she said.

Every Tuesday Fawcett and her handy helpers load their vane with pies and leave their home in Buhl, which sports a community of about a hundred Mennonites.

“Our faith is based on the Bible. It’s about being submissive, wearing head coverings and conservative dresses. Simple living,” she said.

Looking back Fawcett recounts one day when she sold more than 400 pies in a single day.

“One young man said, ‘Where you do you live? I’ll take them off your windowsill,’ ” she recounted.

She paused for a moment as she saw a customer striding to her booth.

“Mr. Sanderson, I have your pie,” she greeted him.

 “I used to have a customer who’d come every week, and he’d buy a pie for anyone who looked like they wanted one but had never had one,” she said. “He was so sweet. I knew him as Dr. Bob, and Dr. Bob would buy four pies every week and take them to his neighbors.”

In all, Fawcett estimates she’s attended about 775 farmer’s markets and sold about 220,000 pies—most of those at the Ketchum and Hailey Farmer’s Markets.

“Keep in mind we made double crusted pies, which would be around 420,000 crusts and each one was hand-rolled. All in our little kitchen built onto our house.”

Over the years, customers have encouraged her to try using butter or vinegar in her pie dough, but she’s stuck to her guns, using just four ingredients—flour, Crisco shortening, cold water and salt.

And, even though she won’t be bringing pies to Ketchum any more, she is leaving her faithful customers with a small paper cookbook that includes the recipe for the pie crust, as well as the pies themselves. The most popular ones were marionberry-raspberry and strawberry-rhubarb, using the rhubarb she grew in her back yard.

She surveyed the customers milling around the Farmer’s Market.

“Our customers are good, down-to earth people and we will miss them,” she said. “It’s been a long enjoyable life, but it’s time.”