Butler native Justin Cherry bakes between 50 and 60 loaves of bread at Mount Vernon, home of the first president. Once a month, he pitches his tent and sets up his outdoor clay oven in the Virginia community.

Cherry is there with the business he founded in 2017, Half Crown Bakehouse, as baker-in-residence. He bakes with two goals in mind: to educate and give buyers a taste of the 18th century.

The night before he bakes, he starts a fire in the oven, so that it can be hot enough to maintain its heat when he takes out the coals at 5 a.m. the following morning, when he will mix 100 pounds of dough by hand.

Cherry, a culinary historian, uses two 18th-century wheat varieties: Rouge de Bordeaux wheat, milled at the Lee family home at Stratford Hall, and Purple Straw wheat, milled at George Washington’s Gristmill.

He uses authentic ingredients as a tribute to the 18th-century bread-baking techniques typical to Washington’s home, according to Mount Vernon’s website.

At 9 a.m., when Mount Vernon opens, Cherry is in a good place to show interested passersby the different stages of the baking process, such as the fermentation it takes and the shaping of the dough.

His bread, and other goods — including clothbound New England cheese, salt pork butter and smoked ham — will all be ready to sell around 11 a.m.

On a typical day, he will be sold out by 2:30 p.m.

The night before his residency at Mount Vernon starts each month, Cherry is already preparing. He’s only there a few days every month. However, for some buyers, his historic bread will be the main reason they venture to the first president’s estate that day, said Justin’s mother, LuAnn Cherry.

“Some folks I’ll see at Mount Vernon (will be) like ‘Hey, where can we see you next?’” Justin Cherry said. “Some of these folks have even traveled to places that I set up in South Carolina, North Carolina and all over the east coast.”

The baker is never deterred by weather, baking in the Virginia heat, or 8 inches of snow. He and his bakehouse are based out of Charleston, S.C., but are not limited by location, traveling all over the Eastern Seaboard on a mission to serve a dish of 18th-century education.

While the closest he returns to Butler is Fort Ligonier — he will be selling at Ligonier Days Oct. 9 to 11 — his work is intertwined with his heritage.

“Deeply rooted in what I do is where I’m from,” Justin Cherry said. “My dad always loved history, and my mom’s a genealogist, so all that history was deeply rooted in me.”

Western Pennsylvania is front and center for much of French and Indian War history. A Native American guide — sympathetic to the French — shot at George Washington as he was traveling near Harmony.

“If Washington had done something somewhere else in another region, it wouldn’t have had such an effect on me and my family,” Justin Cherry said. “I actually probably wouldn’t have a place where I was the resident baker at.”

From the age of 4, he would join his older brother, Jason, and his parents to travel to reenact history.

“I was just a kid at reenactments dressed in 18th century clothes,” he said.

Justin Cherry and his family portrayed a part of a military group that built the first fort in the early 1750s in what is today Pittsburgh at regional events and in Western Pennsylvania.

When he started, he portrayed a child, but the role grew as he did. Toting a musket, he became part of the military group as he grew older.

Here, he learned how to engage with primary sources and historical documents that fostered an interest in research, LuAnn Cherry said.

The family traveled as far as Nova Scotia to attend living history events.

During his childhood, Cherry learned to bake by watching his mother and grandmother.

His great-grandfather, who he never met, owned bakeries in Grove City and Butler. That knowledge was handed down through generations, from great-grandfather to grandmother to mother to son, giving Justin Cherry a “solid core of something that I really like to do,” he said.

LuAnn Cherry said she watched him experiment on his own, recalling the first time that he baked a chocolate chip cookie in grade school.

“He came into the room with a plate of chocolate chip cookies,” she said. “I said, ‘Where did you get these?’ He says, ‘I made them. It wasn’t hard.’”

His early kitchen experimentation was not a continuous endeavor, as his interest in cooking gave way to athletics in his high school years.

He kicked for Butler Senior High School’s football team. He was an all-state punter and place-kicker, who currently still holds the record for Butler’s longest field goal.

It wasn’t until he suffered a knee injury his sophomore year of college at Rhode Island that he returned to his early love of cooking, and he went to culinary school.

He started working in restaurants in 2005, and moved to Charleston, S.C., in 2010.

“I fell in love with wood-fire cooking at Husk,” Justin Cherry said of the Charleston restaurant he worked at for eight-and-a-half years. There, he first began to experiment with different, heritage ingredients.

He even started a baking program using the restaurant’s wood-fired oven.

As more than 80 hours a week of work became unsustainable for his life and his family, he founded Half Crown Bakehouse, combining his love of wood-fired baking and living history.

In 2019, he was awarded a research fellowship at the Fred W. Smith Library for the Study Of George Washington at Mount Vernon, according to his company’s website. In 2022, he became the resident baker at Mount Vernon, where he works as a sort of subcontractor and educates a couple of days every month on historical baking.

Athletics never entirely left his life either. When Justin Cherry bakes bread, he often mixes and shapes 100 pounds of dough by hand, making between 45 to 60 loaves, depending on the event that he is doing.

An “unspoken part of the war was how it was supplied,” Justin Cherry said. “An army moves on its stomach.”

He sells a two-pound loaf, which is more of the general weight of a common loaf. For Revolutionary War events, he sells a five-pound loaf, which comes with the development of the baking department. The five-pound soft loaf was meant to feed one soldier for five days.

“I’m speaking from a person that does a trade that was highly important back then,” he said. “Now, we think of these things as commodities. Like there will always be food. There will always be bread.”

But back then, bakers had to be intentional about what food they supplied armies and when. “It’s pretty easy to overlook that,” he said.

He only takes one month off during the year to travel with his family, he said. The rest of the year he spends traveling, baking and educating.

His older brother now works as the historian for the Trent House in Trenton, N.J. His parents, LuAnn and Ken, are retired teachers from the Butler Area School District.

Their love of living history is a family affair.

“When Justin researches, if he finds something that he thinks Jason’s interested in, he gets that information to him,” LuAnn Cherry said. “They trade information constantly.”

This Christmas, if the Coast Guard deems the water levels safe, his brother and father will cross the Delaware on Durham boats, just as Washington did 250 years ago, while he will supply gathered crowds with fresh-baked bread.

The whole family will be together for the holiday. Justin Cherry anticipates that he will probably bake a couple hundred loaves of bread.

“Having a couple extra helping hands won’t hurt,” LuAnn Cherry said.

Half Crown Bakehouse

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Justin Cherry sells his products up and down the East Coast, not just at Mount Vernon.

Nearby, he will be a vendor at Fort Ligonier Days from Oct. 9 to 11 in Ligonier, Westmoreland County.

For more information, visit www.halfcrownbakehouse.com.