- Rather than turning it into a museum or an antique store or something like that, we felt pretty honored that we could keep it going and producing product.

That's a really important part of it.

(guitar music) Hi, my name is Billie Erickson.

I'm the Owner of the Fowler's Milling Company.

We bought the mill, my husband and I, back in 1985.

My husband loved to bake bread and we started out searching for really good flours and then we learned about different mills throughout Ohio and learned that this one was for sale and we decided we would buy it and try to get started in business and that was 35 years ago.

But we spent two years just getting the building cleaned up and making it all work.

We started with pancake mixes because of the connection here in Chardon and Geauga county with maple syrup.

We have about 27 products now and most of them are designed to be sold with fresh fruit from the farm.

We have several hundred wholesale customers, farm markets all across the country.

Yeah, it's been awesome.

We actually are doing it pretty much the same way that we have always done it.

We stone-grind corn and wheat from local farmers into flour and corn meal and we use some of those products in our baking mixes and then we do a lot of blending.

So a lot of what we do more than even milling is blending of these baking mixes.

- Hello, my name is Tony Krysiak, I'm the Production Operator.

I do all the production work for our mixes by mixing them up here on the third floor.

What we're gonna be doing today is we're gonna be mixing Apple Crisp Mix.

What we do is we have a production sheet that we use.

We write the date down, this is the number, this is the weight.

So what I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna lay it all out so I prepare everything.

Our Crisp Mix is actually our best seller.

That's one of the easier ones to mix.

Some stuff has got 12, 13 items that you have to weigh out and put in.

I'm gonna start with a bag of the rolled oats that goes in a mixer first.

(guitar music) So we have all our brown sugar, then we're gonna add the white flour.

What we're gonna do now is we're gonna run the mixer for about eight minutes.

- We start out with the fruit season.

So, the very first fruit that farm markets open with are strawberries.

So we have Strawberry Shortcake Mix and Strawberry Crisp Mix And then we kind of just go through the fruit season.

So then the next would be blueberries, Blueberry Muffin, Blueberry Cobbler, Blueberry Crisp, peach products.

Apple season, we have a lot of apple products.

At the end of the season, pumpkin.

We have Pumpkin Bread and Pumpkin Pancake Mix.

- Okay, what we're gonna do now is we're gonna dump this mixture into the tank down below.

Let the air go (air whooshing) and we open it, just by dropping this and then hopefully, the first sack will fill up.

(chuckles) (engine roaring) And it's flowing, and that's what we do when we mix here at the Fowler's Milling Company.

- We have a lot of great customers.

We get new customers all the time.

Our staff that's been here we have the same staff, core staff for the last 30 years and we've been really very well supported by the local community and the whole greater Cleveland area really.

I mean, it's a historic building, it's built in 1834, it's on the national register.

It's been a historically important part of Geauga County.

(light-hearted guitar music) - [Announcer] WVIZ ideastream.

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