Group of volunteers, including Spokane woman, behind 177-year-old sourdough starter inundated after viral TikTok

Mary Buckingham makes frequent trips to her local post office, where she mails sourdough starter kits to anyone who requests them. But a recent phone call from a postal worker shocked her – she had received more than 1,000 letters in a week.

Buckingham was confused. People usually learn about the bread kits by word-of-mouth. She had no idea what had suddenly made interest rise.

She’s part of a volunteer group committed to continuing “the old pioneer tradition of giving good sourdough starts to anyone who wanted it.” The starter is based on one from the 1800s, according to the group. The volunteers typically send a few thousand Carl Griffith’s 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Starter kits to interested parties every year.

Then Buckingham heard from the postal worker that the kits were featured in a recent TikTok.

“Did you know that you can send a self-addressed envelope to this address, and they will send you back a 100-plus-year-old dehydrated sourdough starter for free?” Susan Robison said in the video posted on Jan. 10, after hearing about the kits from a family member. She never expected it to go viral.

From the basement of her Colorado home, Buckingham emailed the group’s other active volunteer, Stacie Kearney, with a warning that their lives were about to get a lot more hectic.

Since then, Buckingham, 69, said her job as the group’s mailbox keeper has become full time. She said she has received about 7,000 requests in about a month – more than double what the group usually receives in an entire year.

Buckingham hasn’t had time to comprehend how a 59-second video – from an app she has never used – upended her life. She and Kearney have grown sourdough starters and filled envelopes for more than eight hours every day for more than a month.

“It’s just taken up all my time,” Buckingham told the Washington Post, adding: “Usually, you know, you get a spike and then it’ll taper off. But this just keeps coming and coming.”

The Griffith family had baked with the starter for years, including during their trek along the Oregon Trail, according to the sourdough group’s website. On a small online forum for sourdough bakers in the 1990s, Carl Griffith offered to send his family’s starter to anyone interested.

When he died in March 2000 at the age of 80 in Sequim, Washington, members of the forum, including Buckingham, wanted to preserve the tasty and reliable starter and share it like Griffith had. A few people volunteered to grow and preserve the starter and mail it across the world.

The group’s process for requests, which usually takes six to eight weeks, starts when Buckingham picks up envelopes from customers at a post office box near her home. She sends the envelopes to another volunteer, who mixes the starter with water and flour, spreads it on wax paper and dries it for a few days before crumbling it into pieces. The volunteer then places a teaspoon of the starter into a plastic bag to mail back at no charge. The volunteers operate solely on donations, which they encourage people to mail with their requests.

The group lists instructions online for growing the starter with water and flour. It can be used to make bread, biscuits, pancakes, cakes, brownies and dozens of other recipes.

Normally, Buckingham spends about three hours per week processing requests. But her schedule changed after the TikTok.

Robison, 26, occasionally posts baking videos from her home in Michigan, she wrote in an email to The Post. On Jan. 10, she posted about the sourdough starter on TikTok, hoping to help others interested in baking.

Robison did not intend for the TikTok to disrupt the volunteers’ lives, she wrote. As of Tuesday night, the video had been viewed more than 406,000 times.

“I’m shocked,” she wrote, adding that most of her recent TikToks had only gotten a couple hundred views each.

On Jan. 20, Buckingham received the call from the post office in Greeley, Colorado, about her large pile of letters. She paused her hobbies: remodeling her house, piecing together her genealogy and cooking.

While Kearney, the group’s chief starter grower, normally handled the baking, Buckingham started pitching in. She said her 80-year-old sister, Barbara, is helping, but she’s still behind on about 600 requests.

Once she had sorted through the thousands of envelopes, Buckingham sent most of them to Kearney in Spokane.

The 39-year-old was thrilled when she first heard about the flood of interest in the sourdough starter. Since ordering one herself in 2017, Kearney has used it in all of her bread recipes, including those for her small baking company, Lucky Lady Bread. She volunteered to grow the starter in 2020.

For more than a month, she has been growing the starter on about 20 cookie trays at a time, but she never seems to have enough.

“It’s not cute anymore, but I’m trying to get through it and, you know, support everybody and keep that same enthusiasm,” Kearney said about the thousands of new orders.

Buckingham said she has considered charging a fee for the starter – only to reduce the number of orders. She and Kearney are trying to respond to requests within 10 weeks.

“If this were going to stay like this forever, we’d have to change,” Buckingham said. “… You just can’t keep up like this. I mean, I do have other things to do in my life.”