Not many people build a small fortune out of biscuits. Annie Fisher did — in Columbia, starting from nothing, in an era stacked against her in every direction.
Fisher was born December 3, 1867, in Boone County, the daughter of Robert and Charlotte Knowles, who had been enslaved before the Civil War, according to the State Historical Society of Missouri. She left school after the third grade to work as a babysitter and help support her family, and never went back for a formal education. She started out cooking for other people’s households — the George Bingham Rollins family in Columbia, and the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house at the University of Missouri — before she ever had a business of her own.
The Biscuits That Built a Business
What she built that business on was beaten biscuits, made the way she’d learned to cook: “real old Missouri style,” with butter instead of oleomargarine, everything from scratch, nothing shortcut. She was known to say the recipe just took common sense — which undersold, by a lot, how good she was at it.
The turning point came in 1904, when Fisher entered her beaten biscuits at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition — the St. Louis World’s Fair — and reportedly won a gold medal for them. That put her on the map well past Columbia. Missourians who’d moved away started mail-ordering her biscuits, and orders came in from as far as New York and California, according to SHSMO.
What She Built With It
Fisher didn’t just sell biscuits — she ran a real enterprise, and she ran it herself. By 1919 she was pulling in $500 a year from ham sales alone and another $1,200 a year from rental properties she owned, real money for the time. She built two substantial homes in Columbia: a sixteen-room house at 608 Park Avenue, and a second home she called “Fair Oaks” on Highway 63. She personally oversaw the construction of both and kept the books on all of it herself. The income also put her daughter, Lucille, through a music conservatory education.
All of that happened during the Jim Crow era, which makes the scale of what she built — real estate, a catering and mail-order business with customers coast to coast, enough income to educate her daughter — worth sitting with. She wasn’t handed any of it.
Fisher died June 11, 1938, in Columbia, at age 70. If you’ve ever had a beaten biscuit at a Missouri gathering and wondered where that tradition came from, there’s a real chance the thread runs back to a Boone County cook who turned a family recipe into an empire, one order at a time.
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