Georgia Town Still Nuts About Its Fruitcakes

The jokes don’t offend John Womble.

He even collects them, such as a gag Christmas card labeled “Attack of the Killer Fruitcake.”

“I think about this every time I make a cake. I make sure you’re never going to knock off on my cake,” says Womble, the third-generation operator of the Georgia Fruit Cake Co.

Although many deride the holiday dessert as an inedible doorstop, Claxton has long embraced fruitcake as its claim to fame. City-limit signs and a 50-foot water tower carry the slogan “Fruitcake Capital of the World.”

Joking aside, the dense mixture of poundcake, nuts and translucent candied fruit has enough fans to support two fruitcake bakeries in this south Georgia city of 2,200, located 45 miles west of Savannah.

The larger Claxton Bakery Inc. ships more than 4 million pounds of fruitcake every year for retailers such as Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club. The Wombles’ bakery makes several hundred thousand pounds, mostly for sale to military bases.

That makes Claxton a legitimate contender for its self-proclaimed “fruitcake capital” title. Its main rival is Corsicana, Texas--where the Collin Street Bakery cranks out about 4.5 million pounds of fruitcake annually.

“It means a lot to us to have something that we can hang our hat on,” says Perry DeLoach, Claxton’s mayor of 32 years. “It may have never brought us an industry, but it has brought an awful lot of people to Claxton. They’ll always stop in Claxton and buy fruitcake.”

Different families own Claxton’s two bakeries, but both owe their recipes to the man who introduced fruitcake to the area.

Italian immigrant Savino Tos opened the Claxton Bakery in 1910, selling fresh bread, pastries and homemade ice cream. During the holidays, Tos also baked fruitcakes.

It was Tos’ two young apprentices who would stake their businesses on fruitcake and market it around the world.

Ira Womble and Albert Parker both started working for Tos at young ages--10 and 11, respectively. Womble left in the 1920s to manage a federal bakery in Iowa, while Parker remained and took over the Claxton Bakery when Tos retired in 1945.

When grocery stores began stocking fresh bread and other baked goods after World War II, Parker decided to specialize in fruitcake and market it far beyond Claxton. He produced 45,000 pounds of fruitcake in his first year.

“We make that much cake now every day before lunch during the season,” says Dale Parker, one of Albert Parker’s four children who now run the bakery. “We’ve come a long ways.”

Ira Womble returned to south Georgia in the 1940s, opening a bakery with help from automobile tycoon Henry Ford, who wanted Womble to experiment baking with soy products. In 1948, Womble moved back to Claxton and opened the Georgia Fruitcake Co.

It was his son, Ira Womble Jr., who landed the bakery its first military contracts--for 116,000 pounds of fruitcake--when he entered the family business in 1954. Ira Jr. and John Womble now run the bakery.

Dale Parker says sales are strong, up this year from 2000. And John Womble says this may be his best year in a decade.

Still, both families are mindful of being the butt of so many holiday jokes, such as Johnny Carson’s well known crack that there’s only one fruitcake, which gets passed around year after year.

“It’s not a joking matter,” says Parker. “It’s like you’re talking about a member of our family.”

Womble wonders if the yuks will hurt fruitcake’s future. Most of his walk-in customers are in their 50s or older, and he wonders if younger generations have been biased by fruitcake-bashing.

“People from their 40s down have been influenced mainly by television and radio jokes about fruitcake, and they haven’t tried it because they think it’s bad,” Womble says. “That’s the reason I don’t run from jokes about fruitcake. I’ve changed many people’s minds.”

So what distinguishes good fruitcake from bad? Good means lots of pecans and walnuts, candied cherries and pineapple--and very little cake, Parker says. The Claxton Bakery says its cakes are 70% fruit and nuts.

“We put just enough batter in it to hold the fruit together,” Parker says.

And what about fruitcake’s infamous life span? Can it really reach antiquity and still be edible?

Left out on the kitchen counter, fruitcakes will last about four months, after which the nuts go bad, Parker says. But stored in the refrigerator--not frozen--”they’re good pretty much indefinitely.”

In south Georgia, even fruitcake-haters show some deference to Claxton.

Last year, a Savannah radio station held a contest to drop, toss and catapult unwanted fruitcakes to see which made the best splatter. But contest rules prohibited destroying Claxton fruitcakes.

That thought gets a smile from Womble, who blames substandard fruitcakes for tarnishing the dessert’s reputation.

“We’ve got too many people who are hungry to throw food away,” he says. “Of course, some of those cakes deserve to be thrown. Twice.”