If you've ever smiled at an Eat'n Park Smiley Cookie — that cheerful frosted circle with the grin piped on top — you've been holding a piece of Titusville history. Because that cookie didn't start in Pittsburgh. It started here, in a small bakery on Franklin Street, sometime in the 1940s.
Ellsworth Warner was a baker. Not in the artisan, Instagram-era sense. In the everyday sense — the kind of person who woke up before sunrise and made things people wanted to eat. He opened Warner's Bakery in 1949, and among everything he baked, one item kept making people stop.
A cookie that made you grin.
The Smiley Cookie wasn't complicated. It was a soft, frosted sugar cookie with a face piped on top — two dots for eyes, a curved line for a smile. Simple. But something about it worked. People didn't just buy one. They bought a dozen and brought them home. Kids wouldn't eat any other cookie. Adults drove across town for them.
Word spread the way word spreads in a small town: slowly, then all at once. The Smiley Cookie became a Titusville thing. A Warner's thing. The kind of item locals assumed everyone in the world already knew about, because to them, it was just part of life.
"The cookie that inspired Eat'n Park's Smiley Cookie? It started in this kitchen. On this street. In this town."
1986: The phone call that changed everything.
In 1986, Jim Broadhurst — the founder of Eat'n Park, the Pittsburgh-based family restaurant chain — remembered a smiling cookie from Warner's in Titusville. That cheerful little face had stuck with him.
With Ellsworth Warner's blessing, Eat'n Park obtained the rights to create its own Smiley Cookie, inspired by the one Broadhurst remembered from Warner's. Eat'n Park's version went out to its restaurants across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia and became one of the most recognized regional cookies in the country — a holiday staple, a children's icon, a Pittsburgh institution.
But here's what most people don't know: the cookie that started it all is still baked in Titusville. Warner's Bakery never stopped. The smiling cookie Ellsworth Warner created — the one that inspired Eat'n Park's — is still made here, fresh every morning, the same way it's always been made.
What Hilary inherited.
When Hilary Hanna bought Warner's Bakery, she inherited more than a building and an oven. She inherited that story. The Smiley Cookie comes with decades of weight — the kind of weight that's actually a gift, if you treat it right.
She treats it right. The cookie is still soft. The frosting is still piped by hand. The smile is still the smile. Nothing has changed — because nothing needed to.
If you want the original Smiley Cookie — not the chain version, but the actual, first-made, Ellsworth-Warner-recipe Smiley Cookie — there's only one place to get it. It's a small bakery on Franklin Street in Titusville, Pennsylvania. It's been there since 1949. And it's not going anywhere.