I'm here at the Elkhart County Visitor Bureau with Terry Terry.

The Elkhart County Fair is obviously one of the biggest things going on right now.

I didn't realize just how big as a person who came from another country.

The county fairs are absolutely massive, and the Elkhart County Fair must be one of the biggest ones.

It is.

It's one of the third largest four age fair in the nation.

So yeah, so at this level and so it is a wonderful eight day extravaganza of youth and agriculture and carnival food, fair food, fried elephant ears and hot dogs and pie and all the goodness of the Midwest.

America, right.

It feels like America.

Like, you know, the fair.

But all the things that you think about.

But again, it's just a lot of people having fun.

I just wish it was in the fall.

So it wasn't so hot personally.

But I know that's part of it.

That's why people love.

And and from a visitor or point of view, I know it's really big with locals.

Do many people actually travel in for the fair as well, or is it mostly local people that go to it?

Well, it's a mix, but they have a fantastic music series with artists ranging from Ludacris to Charlie Crockett.

So these artists have a fan bases that draw from all over the area.

So I would imagine in particular for the concert series, you're going to see people from all over the region coming here for that.

And I know that I haven't actually heard about this before, but there's a grand prix coming up.

What's that?

Yeah.

So past few summers in early August, we have the Elkhart Grand Prix, which is kart racing that takes over the streets of downtown Elkhart.

So these are really powerful machines.

They don't look like like, like F1 or any car, but they can go really fast and it's really cool.

And to see racers going at these really high speeds, you know, everyday life should, shouldn't do that.

Yeah.

But it's a lot of fun and people love it.

And it's a it's a great weekend in Elkhart.

That's cool.

Yeah I wasn't familiar with that.

And I noticed something I love, which is the World Rally Championship, which happens all over the world.

And that's coming for the first time back to the US next year in like Tennessee.

So if you could try and get that anywhere in this region, that would be amazing for 2028.

So if you could just work on that, that would be great.

All right.

I'll get you some more notes from.

Thank you.

Well, one thing that we can guarantee on for now is Bonneville Mill.

So tell me a little bit about their experience that's coming up.

So first of all, Bonneville Mill is the oldest continuously operating grist mill in Indiana.

And this year, visitors can learn a little bit more about how water was used to power mills like them and how it really helped build industry.

And so you can sign up to start at the Elkhart County Historical Museum, which was not not a couple miles away in Bristol.

Learn about water and then go to the mill.

Get a demonstration about how the mill works here.

A talk from the miller about the history of the mill, and then get to see the mill and operation and then take, perhaps take home a bag of fresh ground cornmeal.

That's what I did recently when I was there, and I love it.

I think it's absolutely amazing.

And I know that every year you have a well crafted video series, and Bonneville Mill was featured on last year.

Yeah.

So we're going to watch that right now here on Experience Michiana and get a deeper look inside everything that you were just talking about.

Bonneville mill is a grist mill.

There are many different kinds of mills, and for example, a sawmill would produce lumber, but a grist mill specifically grinds grain into flour.

Grist mills were very important in Indiana because back when Bonneville was built, almost everybody was at least partly farming for their income.

So all of those crops produced grains that had to be ground in order to make usable products such as flour and cornmeal.

So Bonneville Mill, of course, when it started, was a service to the local farmers.

And at one time there was quite a variety of different grains that were grown in Indiana.

That has kind of been reduced in recent years.

So we don't grow as large a variety of grain as we did when this mill first opened.

But this mill has always ground wheat and corn, rye, those are very common grains.

And we still grind those particular grains today.

Our main goal is to preserve the mill, preserve the history, preserve the culture, and demonstrate those things to the visiting public that comes into the mill.

Currently, we grind wheat, rye, oats, buckwheat, spelt yellow and white corn.

In the fall, we separate the stones so that they can be cleaned and serviced, and in the spring we put them back together so that we can start grinding for the next season.

So today we took the top stones and we placed them back on top of the bed stones because a set of millstones.

There's a top on the bottom, the the runner stone and the bed stone, and we put them together so that we could get them ready for the grinding season.

The turbines are actually located in the water, in the basement of the mill, and directly off the top of the turbine.

There is a drive shaft, and drive shaft is right behind me back here.

And that drive shaft goes all the way to the top so that it can power any of the equipment above this floor and on this floor, the drive shaft can be attached to machinery using gears, belts and pulleys.

Those are the most common things that we have to machinery up to our drive shaft.

We have two sets of grindstones.

One is French burr and one is granite.

Both are very hard stones.

The French burr stones are original Edward Bonnie stone.

So he brought those here when he came in 1837, and we are still using them.

The milling process has a number of different aspects to it, depending on what product you're trying to make.

You have to set the gap between the stones, the speed at which the top stone is rotating, and the speed at which the grain is feeding into the eye of the stone.

All of those things have a little bit to do with how fine or course the product comes out.

And so if you're making a wheat flour that you want to be very fine, you're going to have a tight gap set on the stones, you're going to feed the grain in relatively slow, and you're going to have the top stone moving at a fairly good pace.

So all of those things, every time you are grinding something different, you have to pay attention to each of those three things.

Our goal is to talk to every person that comes in the door and to demonstrate the grinding process to them.

History is important because we can look at history and we can learn the way things were, and we can also get ideas of how we can do things in the future.

And to me, it's kind of interesting that this mill was a water powered mill still is.

And we've kind of forgotten about wind and water.

And in this day and age, we are reverting back to those ideas as potential power sources for a lot of stuff that we're doing nowadays.