(upbeat music) (motor engine revving) (calm music) - [Narrator] On this episode of "Scenic Stops and Stories."

- [Brent] Items I'm selling today is my 18-hour slow-cooked brisket.

- [Greg] There's really hardly anybody out there doing what we do in a food truck.

I just think it's something different.

- [Michael] We're definitely known for our mashed potato bowl.

I take fresh tenderloin, hand-bread, and hand-fry every piece to order.

- [Emily] We also have large portion sizes of our french fries.

We go through about 87,000 pounds of potatoes a season.

- [Debbie] On the fourth Wednesday of each month, we sit in the dining room around the table, have some tea and some cookies.

- [Christine] The Allen County Museum is actually a campus of buildings.

But first.

- [Jera] Gosh, what does it smell like?

Home.

It smells like my mom's Sunday afternoons.

That's what it smells like.

Can you smell it?

(laughs) (keyboard typing) (mouse click) (calm music) -[Jera] The baked goods here are from scratch.

This place, to me, it's like being in your grandmother's kitchen.

- [Brianna] It feels relaxed, but also fun.

A little bit old school.

You know, we have an old school feel, but with lots of young, bright faces.

So it just feels comfortable.

- [Jera] My name is Jera Stewart, and I'm the owner and operator of "Jera's Heavenly Sweet Bakery, LLC."

- [Brianna] I am manager, decorator, whatever else Jera needs here at "Jera's Heavenly Sweet Bakery."

- Goes back a long way.

First time into the kitchen by myself, nine years old.

My mom just was very excited about baking.

So that's when I got the bug.

And just as life went on, I just, I grew in my talent to bake, and my desire and interest in baking.

And she's coming out.

That is what it should look like.

- She started the home-based bakery, and it began to grow and almost outgrow the kitchen at home, at my mom's house.

And I was in college at the time, and I could see it growing.

And she was starting to tease, "Okay, I think I might need to open a brick and mortar now."

And I said, "Listen, ma'am, I am in my last year of college, and I'm willing to help you, but you have to do this before I graduate.

If you do it after, I'm gone.

I'll have a job.

I'm not coming back."

And the summer before my senior year, she started it.

She found her first brick and mortar, and I said, "Okay, well, I guess this is it.

I'm in."

- We respect each other's roles.

She's excellent at what she does.

She is a good organizer.

She keeps me, she helps make me trendy.

I don't, I fight being trendy.

I wanna be old-fashioned, because that's comfortable.

But she's like, "Well, there's time.

We need to do this, we need to do that."

So I listen to her, and I think she listens to me, old-school stuff.

It's like, "No, that's not what my customers want.

My customers, I know them.

They want such and so."

So I think it's a good dynamic in that way.

She gets on my last nerve some days, okay?

It's just, and sometimes I would fire her, just 'cause like, "I don't like your attitude," but I would never fire her, because I need her too much.

She is my definite right arm.

- She's the kite to my string.

So she's the one who has an idea, and she wants to do it right now.

And I'm the one who's like, "Wait, wait, wait.

Hold on, wait.

We gotta think about it.

Like, it sounds good.

We've gotta plan it out."

And you need both.

You need the person who's gonna fly and dream and jump high, but you also need someone who's gonna say, "Well, let's make it make sense and continue to grow in a way that will allow us to succeed and not stumble and fall as much."

- I try not to, I don't go to her church.

I let her go to her church.

I don't come into that.

I want her to have her separate life.

And she said, "Mom, I never get tired of you as mom, but I do get tired of you as boss."

It's like, "I feel you.

I feel the same way."

I just try to make sure that she gets her space, because we are together every day, all the time.

- She wanted me to say it again.

(laughs) - Oh, okay.

- She was like, "Are you okay?"

- You said hi already, but okay.

(laughs) - There are often days when we're in here and I just stop for a minute and I do look at this place and I say, "This isn't just me and my mom working together in a job.

She owns this.

She created this.

I watched her from a child build this up to where it is now, and people come into here like we're a real business.

People actually come to us, and she created this."

And all of a sudden, I'm amazed by her all over again.

- All right, so you've done chocolate chip and chocolate chip nut.

You're taking care of those?

I'll just start with the oatmeal raisin then.

There's some staple items, some things that we need to have every single day.

It's German chocolate cake.

It's the hummingbird cake.

The scones, the cinnamon rolls, the lemon velvet cookie.

You gotta have that every day.

So there's certain things we have to have every day.

Okay, cranberry orange coming out.

And sometimes we just sell out when somebody comes in and cleans us out early in the day.

It's like, "Shoot, gotta get back in there and get cracking."

Chocolate chip cookie.

We give people sometimes a choice of whichever cookie you want for their birthday, we give them a free cookie.

They still will choose a chocolate chip cookie.

It's still one of those that everybody, its a classic.

- The peach cobbler is, I think, hands down the biggest seller that we have.

We go through, what, almost 60, 80 portions a week, and it's gone by the end of the day.

So peach cobbler is a big one.

- You know, in the black culture, it's one of the staples of any time you got together for a function or a funeral or a family reunion, it was always somebody.

Somebody's grandma, somebody's auntie, somebody's gonna do peach cobbler.

And they were known for it.

And we didn't want anybody else to bring it, but that person, because we knew she knew how to do it.

And it's something about it, it does make us feel like home.

It feels safe and comfortable.

And pound cake is another one of those things, but peach cobbler is definitely one of those, makes you feel like, it's nostalgic.

I don't care what household you come from in the black community, peach cobbler was so popular.

But you had to know how to do it.

Can't have no nasty crust.

Can't have that thick crust that's not done.

Or didn't know how to flavor the peaches.

You gotta flavor it with the right amounts of cinnamon and nutmeg and butter.

And the butter I've already melted into the peaches when I was putting the peach filling together, that's melted into the peaches.

So every peach has some butter on it.

(calm music) Gosh, what does it smell like?

Home.

It smells like my mom's Sunday afternoons, when she would make baked chicken and mac and cheese and green beans, fresh green beans.

And she would make dinner rolls and peach cobbler would be the dessert.

(calm music) That's what it smells like.

Can you smell it?

(laughs) (upbeat music) I want to make this place, this location, a destination location so that when anybody comes from out of town for anything here, I want them to hear, "You've gotta go to this little bakery.

This little bakery, their bakery."

That's what I want this place to be.

So until my line is out the door and around the block, I'm not gonna be happy until that has come to fruition.

A destination location, "Jera's Heavenly Sweet" in Toledo, Ohio.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Coming up next, we're hitting the road for some tasty detours that you won't want to miss.

(upbeat music) (concrete scraping) (upbeat music) - Hello, this is my first time at "Big O's Barbecue" and I got the brisket tacos with barbecue sauce and queso on top.

(upbeat music) The queso is a great addition and the barbecue sauce is as tangy as it could get.

Couldn't get better than this.

(upbeat music) - I'm Brent Olsen and I'm the owner of "Big O's Barbecue."

So we're at Earnest Brew Works here off of South Detroit Avenue in Toledo, Ohio.

Back in 2013, my brother really got into smoky meats and he was excited about it and said, "Hey man, you should try it out."

Tried it out and started giving it to friends and family and they started raving about it.

So two years ago, I opened up "Big O's Barbecue" here in Toledo.

(upbeat music) Items I'm selling today is my 18-hour slow-cooked brisket, 18-hour slow-cooked pulled pork, got jalapeno cheddar sausages and also have pork belly bites.

- Right now, I'm about halfway through a taco and it's one of the best I've had.

(upbeat music) - [Brent] Yeah, so normally you serve a homemade mac and cheese.

Takes me about two hours to make.

It's a recipe my brother and I came up with.

- There you go sir.

- [Brent] Here's your order.

- [Customer 1] Okay, thank you.

- [Customer 2] Thank you.

- Thank you.

- [Customer 2] Yeah, thank you.

(concrete scraping) (upbeat music) - My name's Greg Morris and my wife and I are the owners of "Wrappin' & Rollin'" Food Truck.

This is our first season.

We had a restaurant in White House for 13 years, sold it last year and decided to do this.

There's really hardly anybody out there doing what we do in a food truck so I think it's a new experience.

I just think it's something different.

(upbeat music) - We've been in business for about seven years with this truck.

We're definitely known for our mashed potato bowl.

- [Customer 3] Hi.

- How you doing, buddy?

- [Customer 3] Good.

Can I get the mashed potato bowl?

- Got it.

Which is mashed potatoes, our fresh chicken, our garlic Parmesan sauce, cheese and corn.

We're one of the only trucks in Northwest Ohio that take fresh tenderloin, hand-bread and hand-fry every piece to order.

- I'm here in Rossford at "The Loaded Chicken" and I'm very excited to try out what this place has to offer.

(upbeat music) This Midwestern classic is done perfectly and it's one of the best spots in Ohio.

(upbeat music) (concrete scraping) (upbeat music) - Scooters was actually founded 25 years ago by Scott and Diane Hagera.

They really focus on providing quality food fast.

It's not fast food, it's good food fast.

We are known for our large portions of our hot dog sizes.

So we go through about 500 hot dogs a week.

That's including the shorts, the longs and the homewreckers.

It's a lot of hot dogs.

(upbeat music) We also have large portion sizes of our French fries.

We go through about 87,000 pounds of potatoes a season.

I have about five or six fry cutters that cut our fries full time.

And it's manual, you've got the fry cutting machine that they're pulling down and it's a mound.

It's a huge pile of fries, but they're fresh cut.

Fresh cut fries, you can't go wrong with that.

Throw some salt and vinegar on them and they're delicious.

(chuckles) Scooters Dawg House is pretty much a staple to Mentor, Ohio.

For 25 years, people love to stop here after they come to the beach.

A lot of people have come here as kids and now I've got a lot of workers who started, like would come here with their parents when they were like five, six years old and now they're employees here, which is kinda nice.

The staff are fantastic.

My staff are like just rays of sunshine.

They're amazing.

They greet every single person that comes in with a smile on their face.

Super friendly and we have fun 'cause I can rely on them to get the job done and do it well.

We get a lot of people from out of town that have seen us online, on Facebook, like, "Oh, you have to go to Scooters and try their fries or their hot dogs."

I personally love that and they can expect good quality food, prompts, fast service, and yeah, just overall really good time, positive time.

Inside the building, we've got a beautiful mural, license plates, and it's fun.

It's like a very retro feel to it.

I wanna say it's a trip.

Like it's not just coming here for food.

Like people like to come here because it's different.

We're very different and it's a fun place to be.

(upbeat music) (keyboard typing) (calm music) - I'm Debbie Haubert and we are inside the historic homestead at Creek Bend Farm that once belonged to the Roush family.

The family can trace their heritage to John Jacob Wagner and Lucinda Wagner who purchased the property in 1878.

They moved into the house with their daughter, Grace.

Grace grew up here and she married Ernest Roush.

And in a flip on tradition, Ernest moved into this home with his wife and took over the family farm.

Grace and Ernest then had two children, Catherine and Robert.

They both were raised in the home.

One of the greatest gifts, in my opinion, that the Roush family gave us were diaries.

We have written diaries from Ernest Roush and his wife, Grace, that detail what life was like on the farm.

In a way to try to get that information to the public, we created a program called "Spilling the Tea."

So on the fourth Wednesday of each month, we invite folks to come out.

We sit in the dining room around the table, have some tea and some cookies, and we read about the daily life of Grace and Ernest and raising kids.

Okay, so we'll start with March 25th from Grace.

"Ironed from eight to 1:30.

It was awful."

(laughs) As we sit around the dining room table, I ask the guests to pick a date from each month.

And then I read usually the day before.

The day they selected and the day after because stories kind of continue from one day into the next.

It's just giving us a very personal, very intimate look at how they raised their kids, how they made changes to the house, a little bit of what was going on in the world.

But the biggest focus was right here.

It was their community in Lindsey and what you do to raise your kids and your farm lifestyle.

"February 16th.

Today is our 23rd anniversary.

I wanted to go someplace, but I washed instead and ironed in the afternoon and evening."

(laughs) Probably the biggest surprises that I have read are some drama that happens in the village of Lindsey because it's a rural community, small town.

You don't expect to read about any drama that's taking place in town.

Everything from there was a gang of boys that was running around town.

There was a theft, so there was a bit of a sting that was set up here in the house to try to catch the young man that was stealing from them.

So there's good drama.

"Had Shirley's and Norman's stroll here all day to paint the kitchen an awful shade of gray.

(laughs) Was so sick of it, I couldn't eat my supper."

(chuckles) What we've seen so far from participants is that hearing them gives them a better impression on who Grace and Ernest were, makes them feel connected to the last family to live here in the house, as well as gives them some history about Lindsey, about the county, and what was going on in the world in general in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s.

May 8th, 1932, Mother's Day.

"Am I tired?"

(everyone laughs) One of my favorite things about doing the "Spilling the Tea" program is watching people have a connection to their own personal past, whether it's something that has been read from the diary and they remember that, "Oh yeah, my grandmother did that."

And we have a lot of photographs of the people in the village of Lindsey that went to school here, that lived here.

We've had two different people actually recognize relatives in the photos.

One was an uncle, but he was a child going to elementary school.

And another was a grandmother when she was a young woman and she was teaching.

And the ladies here had never seen a photo of their grandmother before she was married and being a school teacher.

So that was a really neat connection for me to see people making.

We will start with June 19th, 'cause she's got quite a bit written.

So we'll start with that.

"Ernest, Robert, and Catherine went to Sunday school in Children's Day.

I was sick and stayed home.

Fire siren blew and it was Louis Overmyer's, a gas explosion.

Uncle Will and Aunt Flora here all day.

I could hardly keep up.

And then when they went, Ernest and Catherine did the dishes and I laid down.

June 20th, did work and Catherine did what she wanted to and I slept and rested the rest of the time.

Was no good.

Just put away dishes and straightened up.

Hoping the girls here and brought a loaf of homemade bread.

June 21st, washed in the morning and Catherine and I went to Fremont in the afternoon and got some things and pictures and Catherine's glasses straightened.

Went to Bowling Green in the evening to see Mr.

and Mrs.

Darwin eaten at 421 South Main Street.

Ernest has June 7th, a Tuesday, Farm Bureau meeting 8 p.m.

Another Tuesday, June 14th, elevator board meeting.

On Friday, June 17th, committee meeting."

So that's everything he kept track of for that week were all of his meetings that he had.

So there's been a few lessons for me to learn all these years working with the Roush family, the house, their belongings.

One of the best lessons that I've gotten is to tell my story because not everybody's going to remember it.

I have grandkids that are eight and 12.

They don't know what I was like before I was grandma.

So trying to document your own personal history whether you're writing on the bottom of a chair that you bought or you're an artist or you make things, put your signature on there and write down the fact that you did it.

Keeping a vacation log, I traveled to these places and this is what I saw and this is what I experienced.

So that's one of the big lessons that I've gotten from going through all of their belongings.

(calm music) (keys clacking) (mouse clicking) (upbeat music) - The Allen County Museum is actually a campus of buildings.

You have the main museum, and then you have a log house that is on the campus, as well as a Victorian house.

When we have visitors come through, they get a really nice mix of things to look at.

The Allen County Museum is a very large facility.

We have two floors.

When you first walk in, one of the first things you're gonna see is the Pioneer Gallery and the very large Conestoga wagon.

That was one of the first ones that came in the area.

That belonged to one of the first families.

(calm music) We have a children's discovery area where families can go and actually do some crafts related to some of the exhibits that we have on view.

Our collection actually talks about pre-history through today.

We have a focus on industry.

We have information on the canal.

We have a lot of transportation and trains.

We have a lot of train enthusiasts that come through from all over the world.

We also have a temporary exhibition space that shows three different exhibits a year.

There's a lot of different things that you can do.

I think we draw people in for lots of different reasons.

- We try to represent all the towns from Allen County.

Allen County has fluctuated throughout time, so there might be some things in nearby towns that we have that aren't a part of Allen County anymore.

But we have stuff from Bluffton, Delphos, Spencerville, Westminster.

No matter the size in the area, we'll have something about their history.

- A couple of the exhibits in the Allen County Museum also are like little recreations of historic stores, like a general store.

We have a dentist office.

We have a doctor's office.

Probably the one that gets the most excitement is we actually have a recreation of when John Dillinger was imprisoned in Bluffton, because that happened here and broke out of prison.

So, we have a whole display on that.

(reflective music) One of the really exciting things that really did pull me to this museum was the fact that we have a Victorian house on campus as well.

(bright music) - Currently, we are at the MacDonell House on the Allen County Museum campus.

MacDonell House was built in 1893, went through several homeowners before it was owned by the MacDonells, James and Ellen MacDonell.

They would be the ones that would hand it over to the Allen County Historical Society in 1960.

They believed in the importance of preserving history of this area.

James MacDonell was actually the president of the Allen County Historical Society for several decades, and they saw a lot of the houses on the Golden Block being torn down at that time, and wanted to make sure that this one was preserved.

And it has been on display for the public ever since the 1960s.

- The decorative arts and the woodwork and everything is just so insanely beautiful that it's just a joy to be able to host events there and have people go through.

(bright music continues) The really exciting thing about the Allen County Museum now and moving into the future is the fact that we're trying to collaborate more with local organizations.

We're trying to have different exhibits that come in, different lectures, different programs, so that we can expand not only the story through an exhibit, but also through the stories that are being told around exhibits through the lectures and programs.

- Currently, we are working with the Johnny Appleseed Metro Park District.

We're getting some of their animals, actually, for our temporary exhibition.

It's all about animals, and we wanted to show taxidermy animals along with these, it's called minimal realism prints, and just talk about the difference between what an artist might make next to the actual animal, and stuff like that.

So, we are in collaboration a lot.

We work with a lot of people.

Actually, the entire show that's on temporary exhibition right now is from the Springfield Museum down by Dayton.

- [Christine] We actually had an increase in attendance of 9.4% this past year, so we're pretty excited about that.

We think it has a lot to do with the fact that we've installed temporary exhibits.

We've been doing a little bit more programming, trying to appeal more to a diverse group and families as well.

(birds chirping) I think it's important to preserve history for the fact that history tells us a lot about where we've been, and it can also lead us into understanding where we're going.

I think that history has a way of repeating itself.

By learning about what we've done in the past, we can improve how we handle situations, hopefully, in the future.

(bright music) - [Hannah] I think the most surprising thing is the size.

We are the only accredited county museum in Ohio, which is a great honor for us to have.

But it does mean that we are a larger-sized museum with way more artifacts, and we get to tell a really big story of not only Allen County, but our connections to Ohio and even the United States as a whole.

The people of Allen County really care about what we talk about and their history, and they want it represented well.

And it's a joy to work with a community that really actually cares about their history.

- [Christine] By going through a history museum like the Allen County Museum, there's a lot you can learn.

And I think that that's the exciting thing about a history museum, is you can learn from the past.

There's a lot here that you can do multiple times throughout a year, and I just hope people make the trip and come to see us.

(bright music)