In 1784, Er Bauet Von Peterkreiter built a gracious stone home at 219 East Main Street, Lititz, Pennsylvania. The stones were actually dug from the streets in the town. The sturdy house was a fortress, warding off Indian attacks, and muskets were fired from its cellar windows. The house was as beautiful as it was practical. Carved wooden panels lined the staircase, and the heavy wooden doors swung on iron strap hinges. Fireplaces were scattered throughout the house and towered above the random plank pegged floors.

In 1850 Julius Sturgis' was baking bread at this very location. Legend has it that a Hobo hopped from a train about a half block from the stone building and followed his nose to the bread bakery. He was looking for a job and something to eat. Sturgis couldn't offer the man a job, but he extended his hospitality and invited the hobo to sit down at the family dinner table. In exchange for the kindness, the Hobo gave Julius a pretzel recipe.

Julius had never baked pretzels, so he decided to test the recipe on his wife and fourteen children. It was a hit, and Julius added pretzel baking to his business. And how things did change. In 1861, eleven years after he baked the first pretzel, Julius stopped making bread and became the first commercial pretzel bakery in America.

The Tshudy family installed the first commercial pretzel machine at the Sturgis Pretzel Bakery in 1971. One state-of-the-art machine can extrude 245 pretzels in a minute or five tons of hard pretzels in a day. Compare that to the record of 40 hand-twisted pretzels in a minute.

Today, the United States Department of the Interior, where Clyde and Barbara Ann Tshudy, the bakery's owners, operate the business, has placed the property on the National Register of Historic Places. Clyde learned the pretzel trade from Lewis B. Sturgis, the son of Julius Sturgis.