Dead King Bread, an offbeat sourdough bakery, finds a home in a Northwest Philly sawmill

Weave your way to Manayunk Timber — a mile north of where Main Street’s bustling bars, restaurants, and boutiques taper off, and just down the hill from Roxborough’s antenna farm — and you’ll be rewarded with the intoxicating smell of freshly cut pine and Douglas fir wafting out of the city’s only sawmill.

There’s a new scent in the mix these days: that of freshly baked bread.

That’s thanks to Dead King Bread, a bakery that’s been operating mainly on a subscription basis for the past eight years. Dead King’s crusty sourdough loaves have long been the result of a disjointed process, with founder Michael Holland and business partner Molly Flannery making dough in one place, ferrying it to another spot for baking, then delivering it to customers in Germantown, Mount Airy, and East Falls.

Now, Dead King has a new home — and a linear bake — inside a bay in Manayunk Timber (technically in Roxborough, at 5100 Umbria St.), allowing Holland and Flannery to grow their customer base, expand their selection, and welcome the public, if only for a few hours a week to start.

While the pair is still building out a retail storefront within the sawmill, the bakery’s kitchen space is up and running. Visit between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Saturdays to see their progress and score sourdough loaves and pizza dough, sunflower seed rye, and buttermilk biscuits, plus canelés and cookies.

Dead King’s 150 subscribers will continue to get bread on their doorstep on a weekly or biweekly basis, and the delivery radius will soon expand to Roxborough and Manayunk. They also have a handful of wholesale customers, including Adelie Coffee House and High Point Cafe in Mount Airy, and the Weavers Way Farm Market.

Each week, Holland writes a note that’s tucked into every bread bag.

As you might imagine, the story behind this literary sawmill bakery is not a conventional one.

Holland is a former art handler who previously worked with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Barnes. He was looking for a way to work for himself when he started baking sourdough in his Germantown home in 2015. His neighbor, Amanda Staples, ran Germantown Kitchen Garden next door and suggested he bake a few extra loaves to sell at her farmstand (where they’re still sold in season). Three years later, he built a wood-fired brick oven on a paved part of Staples’ farm to scale up. Flannery, a longtime hairdresser and a fan of the bread, came on board in 2020 to help the business grow.

Baking on the farm was idyllic — there were sunrises and foxes and plants — but impractical. Flannery or Holland would have to get up early to sweep out and fire up the oven, which had its charms but was temperamental. On top of that, they had to switch to a production space further from the farm, meaning they had to put 150 or so pounds of dough into bins, drive it to the farm, and shape it before baking it off and packaging it up for delivery.

“It wasn’t sustainable,” Flannery said.

They had been searching for a permanent home for years when a friend mentioned that Steve Ebner, Manayunk Timber’s owner, was looking for a tenant for an empty bay in his warehouse. Holland initially was skeptical of the location — after all, Manayunk’s vibe is very different from Germantown’s or Mount Airy’s. But he and Flannery decided to check out the space. They were taken by the sawmill operation itself, but they were really sold by the fact that Ebner had torn up part of his parking lot to plant a forest instead. It was a level of dedication to principles that spoke to them.

The whole thing clicked instantly. “It’s janky. It’s off the beaten path ... They’re craftspeople. We’re craftspeople,” Flannery said. “The tie-in there is so natural.”

“I want to get a bookstore in the front, too,” said Ebner, whose business specializes in milling old-growth wood that’s been salvaged from demolished buildings like St. Laurentius. Ebner’s been on this stretch of Umbria Street for 28 years, 10 of which he’s owned this timber yard. “You won’t even know the street in 10 years. It’s all going to be built up,” he said, gesturing to a forthcoming apartment complex down the way.

Holland, the son of two carpenters, has enlisted the help of many friends and tradesmen to help him and Flannery gradually transform their concrete bay into something completely different. “The goal is to emphasize the height of the space, eventually get some natural light in here and have it feel kind of like a pirate ship-treehouse-bread cathedral thing,” Holland said. The end result promises to be gorgeous, with custom-made French doors (already installed), a wall of windows, and a mezzanine.

They’re keeping costs down on renovations by doing as much of the work as possible themselves, but they plan to launch a Kickstarter to raise money for a delivery truck, air conditioning, construction costs, and a walk-in cooler.

It’ll be some time before Dead King’s plans are fully realized, but even then, don’t expect a traditional cafe or bakery. They want to cultivate a vibe that feels “more like an open house than a retail store,” Holland said.

“We’re trying to strike a balance between being like Where the Wild Things Are and, like, legit.”