In 1877, English immigrant John G. Wright founded the Golden Sheaf, Berkeley’s first wholesale/retail bakery. The original bakery, with a public dining room, stood around the corner on Shattuck Avenue. Bakers lived in an on-site dormitory and university students boarded in rooms upstairs. The business grew into the region’s largest bakery, and this annex was constructed to house its fleet of horse-drawn delivery wagons. Wright helped form a bakers’ union in 1904, and provided a meeting place here for groups advocating temperance and women’s suffrage. In 1906 the bakery produced thousands of loaves of bread to feed refuges from the San Francisco Earthquake.

The bakery business was sold to Wonderbread in 1909 and was moved from this site. In 2000, developer Avi Nevo renovated and restored the building. He then donated it to the adjacent Berkeley Repertory Theater to house its children’s education center. The brick facade still features the Golden Sheaf name and symbol in terra-cotta relief.