Reported by us | Whitman

Remembering Whitman's Toll House, the Route 18 inn where the chocolate chip cookie was born

A South Shore 360 Special: a walk back through Ruth and Kenneth Wakefield's Toll House on Bedford Street, told from the inn's own menu, the newspapers of 1939 to 1985 and the people who worked there, from the dollar dinners to the cookies mailed to soldiers and the New Year's Eve fire.

By the South Shore 360 Community Desk | Published Nov. 15, 2026 | Last verified Nov. 15, 2026, 5:40 p.m. ET

WHITMAN, Mass. In the war years at Kenneth and Ruth Wakefield's Toll House on Bedford Street in Whitman, a traveler on Route 18 could pull up to the long white inn behind its picket fence, sit down to a broiled live lobster dinner for $3 with hot biscuits on the table and a choice of desserts to finish, and, before leaving, ask for a box of cookies to be packed and sent to a boy in the service.

The Wakefields ran the inn for 37 years, and the small, crisp chocolate cookie Ruth served there became the chocolate chip cookie, now the official cookie of Massachusetts. The inn burned on New Year's Eve 1984, a Wendy's at 362 Bedford St. stands on part of the old site, by South Shore Living's account, and what remains of the place lives in the menus, matchbooks and snapshots kept at the Whitman Public Library and in the memories of the people who ate and worked there.

The house on the Boston road

The Wakefields told the house's story themselves, on the back page of a menu the library keeps. "In August of 1930 we purchased Toll House which was built in 1709," they wrote, and "being just half way between Boston and New Bedford it made an ideal place for stage coach passengers to eat, while toll was paid and horses were changed."

Ruth Graves Wakefield had graduated from the Framingham State Normal School in 1924 and taught home economics at Brockton High School, according to Framingham State University, and the couple opened, in their own words, with "a male assistant and one waitress." The menu goes on: "The little house had room for seven tables; in three years time it had grown to take care of sixty-four tables and we now serve one thousand to two thousand guests a day during our busy season." The original assistant, by then the chef, and the first waitress were still with them.

"They opened, first, in the depths of the 1929 depression, and soon became known as the place to get a fine, full-course meal, elegantly served, all for $1," Martha Campbell, the longtime Abington historian, remembered in words South Shore Living magazine printed in 2011, along with the real linen and silver and the circular garden room built around a great tree trunk, which the Wakefields' menu dates to 1936.

The menu still carries the flavor of those rooms, with lobster salad "fresh from nearby shores twice a day," Sunday dinner "from noon until five," a "Town Crier Menu for Boys and Girls," and afternoon tea from three to five, when cinnamon toast and tea cost 40 cents. The owners wrote that "we are convinced that there are no substitutes for butter, cream, eggs, fresh fruit and fresh vegetables in preparing a fine meal," and on the inn's matchbooks, under the word "Telephone," the number was simply "Whitman 100."

A former waitress told South Shore Living how closely Ruth watched that dining room, recalling the night a few of the staff ate desserts in her office while she was supposed to be away, and Ruth walked in, looked at what each of them was eating, met their eyes one by one and walked out without a word. "The next week, the exact cost of our desserts was taken out of our paychecks." A bronze plaque later placed at the site counts the Kennedy family, Bette Davis, Eleanor Roosevelt and "local boxing legend, Rocky Marciano" among the guests.

A taste surprise

The Library of Congress holds Ruth Wakefield's 1938 cookbook, Toll House Tried and True Recipes, and says it contains what food historians consider the first chocolate chip cookie recipe, which she called the Chocolate Crunch Cookie. Wakefield remembered it as an idea she went looking for, telling a Boston Herald-American reporter, as the Saturday Evening Post quoted her in 2025, "We had been serving a thin butterscotch cookie with ice cream. Everybody seemed to love it, but I was trying to give them something different. So I came up with the Toll House cookie."

On March 20, 1939, the Whitman library's notes say, Wakefield and Nestle agreed that the company would print the Toll House recipe on its chocolate and that she would receive a lifetime supply of it. That year a little Nestle's Semi-Sweet Chocolate recipe booklet came out that opens like a postcard home: "In New England, on the outskirts of Whitman, Massachusetts, stands a lovely old Cape Cod house." Its recipe, "taken from Mrs. Wakefield's own cook book," tells the baker to warm the bar a little first, "but do not melt," so it cuts easily with a paring knife, then cut two 7-ounce bars of semi-sweet chocolate into "pieces the size of a pea," drop the dough "by half teaspoons" and bake it 10 to 12 minutes.

By that fall the cookie had traveled as far as the Rio Grande Valley. "They're 'Toll House Cookies' because Ruth Wakefield of New England's famous Toll House Inn originated them," the McAllen Daily Press in Texas told its readers on Oct. 10, 1939, promising "crisp, tender, golden brown cookies" with a "surprise!" in every bite, "a rich bit of semi-sweet chocolate and a taste of walnut."

Cookies in the mail

When the country went to war, the Wakefields' menu, which says the year "marks the twelfth birthday of Toll House," asked every table, "Wouldn't you like to send a box of Toll House cookies to your boys in the service? We'll gladly make up a box of your own selections." On the library's copy, heavy black lines strike the bacon from two dishes and take the luncheon steak off the menu, and a line at the bottom of the page says the waitress "will gladly serve you saccharine in tablet or powdered form, if you wish."

Nestle carried the idea into newspapers across the country. A comic strip advertisement in the Detroit Evening Times on Oct. 25, 1942, followed a young woman named Sugar as she handed boxes of cookies to soldiers, with the line "watch the mail for some Toll House cookies" as they left, above a mail-in recipe offer that began, "Make your soldier happy," and said Nestle's bars and bags of morsels both carried "the original Toll House Cookie recipe." Back in Whitman, Peg Brides, who worked at the inn with her mother, Sue, Wakefield's "right-hand lady in the kitchen," told WCVB in 2017, "All during the war, we sent them all over the world," and when people ordered three dozen, "we always packed 40 in case any broke."

The shortages outlasted the fighting, and "there is a world-wide shortage of sugar," Nestle told Detroit readers on Dec. 9, 1945, in an advertisement beside a plate of "Crisp, Crunchy Toll House Cookies," explaining that "even with the fighting over, we cannot give you all the Nestle's Chocolate Products you want until plenty of sugar is available."

Where the records part ways

The records do not always agree on how the cookie began, since Nestle's own history says Wakefield cut up a chocolate bar expecting it to melt, the plaque says she was out of nuts and the library's notes say she was out of baker's chocolate. John Galluzzo wrote in South Shore Living that the house went up in 1816 and 1817 and called the 1709 date and the toll house name fictitious, and Campbell said nobody minded, because "everybody knew that it was just good promotional technique." The plaque and Framingham State say the Wakefields sold the inn in 1967, the library says they retired in 1968, and the library dates its menu to about 1975 to 1985, though the menu's own words point to the war years.

The last New Year's Eve

The Wakefields moved to Duxbury, and Ruth Wakefield, who died Jan. 10, 1977, at 73, according to Framingham State, is buried in Mayflower Cemetery there, the library says. The Boston Herald's obituary carried her words about the cookies, as the Post quoted them: "I'll never live them down. They've had a very interesting life."

The Saccone family bought and renovated the inn in 1972, according to the plaque, and the house still stood, white and trim behind its picket fence with 1709 painted on its chimney, when the photographer John Margolies came along Route 18 in 1984 and made the picture at the top of this page.

That New Year's Eve, as "some 200 revelers were about to ring in the new year, fire officials said," a grease fire started in the kitchen about 11:30 p.m., United Press International reported the next day. Everyone got out unhurt, UPI wrote, and firefighters from five towns fought the blaze for nearly five hours. "Instead of pouring champagne, we were standing there watching the Toll House burn down. There were 80 employees crying," Carol Saccone told UPI, and the day workers tore down the burned building, she said, "The Toll House will have to come back. It will have to."

The library's notes say the fire spread through the air duct and burned the Toll House to the ground. In one of Russ Battle's snapshots in the library's collection, the roof is burned open above the long front wing, the brick chimney still stands, and the same white picket fence runs along a wet sidewalk where two people in raincoats walk past.

What Whitman kept

On July 9, 1997, Massachusetts made the chocolate chip cookie its official cookie. The plaque says a third grade class from Somerset proposed the bill and that Nestle celebrated by giving away thousands of Toll House cookies at a ceremony at Whitman Town Hall. Photographs taken in 2018 show the plaque under a Toll House sign bearing the date 1709 and the bell-ringing crier who once marched across the Wakefields' menus and matchbooks. The cookbooks she collected over the years went to Framingham State, where she had studied, and the university says she gave them to its library in 1969.

"Everybody who ever ate there will always remember the days of the Wakefields, which were both 'good' and, now, 'old,'" Campbell remembered.

The inn is gone from Route 18 now, but the small, crisp cookie Ruth Wakefield first served there still carries the name of her Whitman inn wherever it is baked, and every warm batch keeps a little of the old house halfway between Boston and New Bedford.

The white house with 1709 on its chimney is gone, and no one answers at Whitman 100 anymore, but every time a tray of small golden cookies comes out of an oven with a bit of chocolate waiting in each bite, a little of the Wakefields' dining room on the old road to New Bedford comes home with it.

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