For the past 19 years, Mary Lee Abba-Gaston has been teaching bread-baking classes out of a huge, old electric Rainier brick oven she purchased from Mount St. Michael’s.

Now it’s time for that oven to find a new home.

“I’ve decided that I work too much, it’s my time to retire,” Abba-Gaston said. “I want to downsize and I want to make time to hike more.”

The black 2-ton oven is the size of a nice chicken coop, and it may have begun its life at Farragut Naval Training Station, which was in operation under some form or another from 1942 until 1950.

“I was told the oven came from there to Mount St. Michael’s,” Abba-Gaston said. She added that the oven sat next to three others just like it in the Jesuit bakery.

Abba-Gaston’s father worked in the fields around Mount St. Michael’s, and she remembers going up the hill to knock on the door at the bakery to get fresh baked bread. She said she was especially fond of Brother Connor’s bread.

In 1997, she paid $250 for the oven, then shelled out another $6,500 to have it moved and installed at her family’s small farm on Lincoln Road.

She moved and reinstalled it in the backyard of her north Spokane rancher about 10 years ago.

The original investment in the oven came from her now-deceased husband’s retirement account, and she said she hopes she can finally pay back the account.

“I’m hoping I can get $8,000 for it,” Abba-Gaston said. “A new oven like this easily costs $50,000.”

Her dream is that the oven can be installed in a place where it can be used as a communal oven.

“People can bring their dough and bake their bread and talk, just like in Italy,” Abba-Gaston said.

Or that the oven can find a home with an organization that will continue her “bread-baking mission” by teaching people how to bake and share bread.

“I will happily show anyone how to use it, and share my recipes,” Abba-Gaston said. “I just hope it can find a new home.”