family business
They might be easy to take for granted, but honeybees make a significant contribution to your daily diet. Honeybees pollinate at least 70 crops produced in Ohio each year, including apples, pumpkins, cucumbers, strawberries, and sunflowers.
Heilman manages nearly 800 hives, which he hires out to farmers. Half of his hives travel out of state, but he estimates his bees alone help Ohio growers produce
$10 million to $15 million worth of crops each year.
Oh, and by the way, those busy workers also make one of the more luscious food products on the planet. Heilman’s bees produce more than 35,000 pounds of honey annually.
Whenever people ask Brian Phillips where his downtown Kenton business is located, the investment adviser replies, “Know that big mural of the singing cowboy? My office is on the other side of it.”
Riding his sorrel horse, Champion, in scores of cowboy musicals, Autry helped to popularize country-western music with ballads like “Back in the Saddle Again,” the 1939 gold record that became his theme song. Autry’s prolific recordings also included two Christmas classics: “Here Comes Santa Claus,” which he cowrote in 1947, and “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which debuted in 1949, has sold more than 25 million copies, and remains his bestselling single.
Josh Bixler and his team once got a 3D printer to fly — while it was printing.
Aviation has been a lifelong passion for Bixler, who grew up in the Alliance area on a farm with a grass airstrip. His father was a general aviation pilot who taught him to fly (“I soloed in a single-engine Taylorcraft monoplane,” he says proudly). Bixler also learned the basic principles of aircraft design and construction while he and his father built numerous RC model airplanes.
Scott and Denise Scherer know the look — folks seeking a little pizzazz for their mundane mealtimes often find themselves wandering into their market, Saucy Sows Sweets and Meats, with a distinct look of hungry anticipation.
The Scherers have spent years perfecting their products and growing the business. Scott left a job in the beverage industry in 2012 in order to pursue his culinary interest. He initially thought about producing a new kind of mustard but quickly realized the market was flooded. After considerable experimentation, he developed sweet pepper mustard using fresh red and green peppers. Numerous taste tests yielded only positive results, but he still needed a name.
6S Products in Anna started with five family members, one injection molding press, and a mission to find a niche while building a foundation of trust, dependability, and value.
When Neil sold his share of that outfit in 1999, the family members went in different directions professionally — ranging from the U.S. Postal Service to real estate and accounting. But they recognized the need for their expertise and the niche market they could provide in plastics manufacturing.
“We stayed out of plastics for a few years and then finally realized there was a role that we could fill,” Neil says. “With our combined experience, we thought we could add value to the industry overall.”
The pole barn — as familiar a fixture on modern farms as a pickup truck — is an architectural innovation born in the 1930s, the result of a marriage of necessity and opportunity.
For decades, the pole barn has reigned supreme on American farms. But the pole-frame structures of today have come a long way from the simple pole barns of the Depression, says Caleb Miller, owner and president of MQS Structures in Lancaster. Pole framing remains a popular design for farm outbuildings, but these days, Miller’s company, a member of Lancaster-based South Central Power Company, may just as likely be using pole-frame construction to build the shell for a far more complex structure.
Among Ohio’s numerous tourism “trails” that group loosely kindred attractions to create a single novelty destination, the recently conceived Sweets and Spirits Trail in Miami County seems a perfect pairing for this time of year.
My husband, Mike, and I made a date of it recently. To guide us along the route, we downloaded the Miami County Sweets and Spirits Trail app, which showcases all stops and includes a map with distances between each location. Some spots offer incentives for visiting, including purchase discounts, free samples, or a free shot glass. As we virtually checked in at each location, we earned points toward prizes from the visitors bureau.
We were taken with the area’s charming small towns and the warmth and authenticity of the trail’s shop owners. For example:
Along the road connecting Fredericktown and Amity in Knox County is a red wooden sign with a lobster on it, marking a driveway leading to 22 acres of wooded property featuring a creek, walking trails, two cabins and a 1961 Shasta Airflyte camper trailer for rent, a house, a
The road to Amity
After graduating from Ohio State University, Fletcher talked his dad into co-signing a loan for a lobster boat and moved to an off-the-grid family cabin in Georgetown, Maine. He spent the next 20 years as a professional lobsterer, hauling water to his makeshift shower and 200 traps’ worth of lobsters per day from the waters surrounding the island town.
Jim Klier has been a mover for 39 years.
Klier has moved plenty of homes for lots of different reasons — some legal, like for zoning issues; others more sentimental. Klier’s moved a lot of older homes. Much older. Like an 1813 timber frame home on Lake Erie.
“Oh, heavens yes,” he says. “A home that’s been in the family for generations, for example. You really have to love the house to do something like that, to go through that process.”
