Oyster Cracker - Origins

Origins

There are at least two rival claims for the invention of the oyster cracker, although Adam Exton is often credited for being the inventor of the oyster cracker.

Adam Exton, the baker of Trenton, New Jersey, emigrated to America from Lancashire, England, in 1842. In Trenton, Exton opened a cake and cracker bakery with his brother-in-law, Richard Aspden in 1846. Although Aspden died the following year, Exton continued with the bakery (named the "Exton Cracker Bakery" or "Adam Exton & Co."). He invented a machine that rolled and docked pastry and solved the sanitary problems of hand-rolling crackers.

The history of the oyster cracker was related by Exton's nephew, also named Adam Exton, in the Trenton Evening Times Newspaper on May 31, 1917:

Even a cracker has a history. The past, present and future of the little disc of baked dough with "Exton" stamped across the face of it was discussed by Rotatian Adam Exton, of the Exton Cracker Company, at the weekly meeting of Trenton Rotaty Club held this afternoon at Hildebrecht's... Manufacture of the Exton oyster cracker was started in Trenton, in the same location now occupied by the company's factory of Center Street, in 1877. Adam Exton, uncle of the speaker, was the originator of the oyster cracker. At the outset the factory had an output of 100 pounds of crackers a day, 36 of them to a pound, making a daily capacity of 3,600 crackers.

Oyster crackers became immensely popular and around 1848, one can find the first advertisements of merchants selling oyster crackers.

The Westminster Cracker Company of Rutland, Vermont, also claims to have been making oyster crackers since 1828. They may have made early crackers, but it is doubtful that they ever disputed the claim made by the Exton Cracker Factory to have been the true originators of the oyster cracker.