Tammy Packer, left, Milton, and Vicki Williams, New Columbia, Pa., order ice cream from RuthAnn Hoover at the recently opened Old Mill Creamery on Buffalo Creek Road in Mifflinburg, Pa.
Farm owner John Nolt talks about the recent opening of his Old Mill Creamery business in Cowan, Pa.
The front façade of Old Mill Creamery in Cowan, Pa. The store recently opened a drive-through for ice cream and will soon add coffee drinks to the menu.
The creamery is in an old mill that had many owners prior to its current use as a creamery. Shown is the mill’s condition in 2019, after the Nolt family had purchased it in 2017 and put on a new roof.
The Reish and Desmond families enjoy ice cream in the air-conditioned creamery. The mother and her two daughters are from Boston and are visiting her mom and dad who live locally.
The demand for the creamery’s products has been high since it opened. Here, customers wait in line for ice cream served in waffle cones made on-site.
Tammy Packer, left, Milton, and Vicki Williams, New Columbia, Pa., order ice cream from RuthAnn Hoover at the recently opened Old Mill Creamery on Buffalo Creek Road in Mifflinburg, Pa.
COWAN, Pa. — Situated along Route 192 between Lewisburg and Mifflinburg, the tiny community of Cowan is bustling with new energy. On June 27, local dairy farmer John Nolt, age 50, together with his family opened Old Mill Creamery LLC in a restored 190-year-old mill. It was a dream many years in the making for Nolt and a journey that he says was not for the faint of heart.
Since its opening, locals and travelers have visited the creamery in droves. On a recent Wednesday just before noon, a line of a dozen people waited for freshly made ice cream served in homemade waffle cones and thick, creamy milkshakes.
Farm owner John Nolt talks about the recent opening of his Old Mill Creamery business in Cowan, Pa.
The milk comes from Nolt’s dairy farm, which got its start in 1993. The farm is located less than a mile from the creamery and has a herd of 58 cows with a herd average of 24,000 to 25,000 pounds. The milk and ice cream are processed on site in industrial-sized holding tanks, pasteurizers, homogenizers, mixers and separators. Nolt said the distance from farm to creamery is a stark difference from most bottled milk, which he said travels on average 300 miles from the farm to the store shelf. Old Mill Creamery’s ice cream tests at 14% butterfat, Nolt said.
Nolt’s home farm is about 75 tillable acres. A second farm is about 100 acres, which helps feed the cows.
Nolt serves as general manager of both the farm and the creamery. His assistants include his son Harvey, age 18, at the creamery, and his son Eugene, age 16, at the farm. His son, Kenneth, age 12, also helps on the farm. His daughters and other family members also help at the creamery, with everything from creating ice cream and bottling milk, to serving ice cream and cleaning.
Nolt said that on many days they struggle to keep up with ice cream and milk demand, and hope to add a second batch freezer to the facility once peak ice cream season has subsided.
Nolt said of the community response, “I did not realize that during the four years restoring this building, having people stop and talk, I was doing public relations and advertising that I was not aware of. (When we opened) we realized that all those people talk with their friends. There was a waiting list to get in the door.”
The Reish and Desmond families enjoy ice cream in the air-conditioned creamery. The mother and her two daughters are from Boston and are visiting her mom and dad who live locally.
Old Mill Creamery serves hard ice cream by the scoop in a dozen flavors: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, raspberry, butter pecan, chocolate chip cookie dough, cookies and cream, coffee, peanut butter Oreo, butterscotch and orange cream, to name a few. Customers can sit at tables inside in the air conditioning or at picnic tables and benches outside.
The small retail store boasts a wide variety of freshly bottled milk: whole milk in gallons, half gallons and single serve; reduced-fat milk and skim milk in gallons and half gallons; and chocolate milk in gallons, half gallons and single serve. Freshly cut flowers are also sold at reasonable prices at the store. The creamery recently opened a drive-thru, an idea that Nolt said he modeled after a mentor, Lapp Valley Dairy in New Holland. Nolt said his niece, who manages the store, worked at Lapp’s last summer and gained tremendous experience helping to manage Lapp’s on-farm dairy and ice-cream shop.
Coming soon to Old Mill Creamery will be strawberry milk, vanilla milk, drinkable yogurt and cheese curds, said Nolt. He also expects to sell coffee drinks and locally baked goods in the coming months. Looking ahead to the future, he also hopes to sell freezer beef from local beef farmers and expand the picnic area at the back of the property.
He said his favorite aspect is that the creamery has already become a social setting for neighbors.
“If you read the history, the hub of these little towns was always their mill,” he said. “The farmers all ended up there and exchanged all the news there. And when you step out here on a summer evening and there’s a group of neighbors standing here and their friends are there. ... It’s like it’s a different variation of that. I love the socializing and seeing friends meeting each other here,” Nolt said, smiling.
According to a historical timeline on display at the creamery, the Cowan Mill, which houses the creamery, has had many past lives. According to Nolt’s research, the first mill to be run on the site was moved from the Forest Hill area by a man named French Jacob. After getting into a land dispute in 1782, Jacob moved his mill to what is now Cowan. He added a sawmill in 1785. The first stationary mill there was built by Adam Wagner around 1795; it burned in 1812. The area was long known as Wagner’s Mill. After it burned, the site was sold to Jacob Baker, who built a mill in 1815. In September 1828 it, too, was destroyed by fire. Baker’s daughter and her husband, Don Johnson, were the last owners to run it as a mill. The first year Johnson owned it, 1942, the mill was gutted by fire. But, he had insurance and the mill was rebuilt and put back into production.
After being closed as a mill around 1960, the structure was used as a chicken barn for several years. Later, the Leroy Wagner family purchased it and ran it as a large ceramic molding business. The ceramic business closed in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
The creamery is in an old mill that had many owners prior to its current use as a creamery. Shown is the mill’s condition in 2019, after the Nolt family had purchased it in 2017 and put on a new roof.
More recently, the property was sold to James Mullen in 2003. He was attracted to the historical aspects of the mill and had all the newer additions removed to reveal the original building. After Mullen died of cancer, his widow sold it to the John Nolt family in 2017. The Nolts restored the building and put in a milk processing plant, an ice cream production business and a retail store.
Nolt said that upon starting his dairy farm, he always had a creamery in mind. Eventually, the dominoes fell into place when he was able to purchase the old mill in December 2017.
“I wasn’t milking long when I just wished I could sell to my neighbors. We had worked for (James Mullen) and didn’t really pay attention to this location or the building, other than the assigned job (the Nolts were hired to clean out the property and do some repairs). But in 2017, Mullen’s widow wanted to sell the property, which was sort of a liability with it being an old building in need of repair. Neighbors said ‘somebody ought to do something with it.’ In December 2017, we decided we were going to buy it and we would do something with it, either make it a storage building or something else. And then by the spring of 2018 over the winter, we immediately fixed the roof.”
Now that they had stabilized the building, they evaluated the location and labor force to see if a creamery venture would be successful.
The front façade of Old Mill Creamery in Cowan, Pa. The store recently opened a drive-through for ice cream and will soon add coffee drinks to the menu.
“We came to the conclusion that if I ever wanted to do a creamery — the timing, the location, my stage of life — it’s now or you won’t do it in your life.”
To get started, Nolt took a three-day ice cream-making course through Penn State. He said that the course’s well-known manual, Ice Cream (7th Edition) by H. Douglas Goff and Richard Hartle, continues to be a reliable source for technical information.
He also visited 20 creameries between Virginia and Lackawanna County to gain expertise from those who recently opened. He felt it was a key component to find mentors who had done the same thing within the past few years, not enterprises that had opened decades earlier.
Nolt said he has learned many lessons over the years of restoration and readying the business. One of the most important things that he learned was to have a wastewater plan, he said, because a creamery uses a lot of water due to washing and cleaning.
With regard to the restoration of the building, they hit a number of stumbling blocks, since codes for new construction and historical buildings differed widely.
“Not everybody interprets an old building the same; that was the most challenging thing — you get told something by one organization and then another would say, no, that’s not how we see it,” Nolt said.
He said new construction is much more straightforward.
Since the property lies in a floodplain, that added an extra layer of forethought.
Throughout the long renovation process, Nolt’s stress levels increased. He admits that he and his family endured a lot of mental anguish because they were assuming a lot of financial and personal risk. He said the family was “all-in,” but he also came to a point where, he said, “I felt like it would be OK if it didn’t work out.”
Above all, he wanted it to be financially viable and feasible on its own.
“It’s my personal ideals and what this country was built on — if it’s worth doing, it should pay its own way. I see so many programs that funding gives a person a short burst of help. But if you don’t have a good business plan, it’s really not a help. It’s a Band-Aid. So, I felt that if this can’t float on its own, I don’t want to do it,” he said.
“My goals for the future are to keep this as a small family business, smooth out what we have here, and get things streamlined and more efficient,” he said.
Nolt wants to diversify rather than expand.
He is grateful for various business partnerships along the way, too. Boop’s Sporting Goods in Mifflinburg put the creamery’s opening on their sign, which received a lot of traffic exposure on Route 45. Penn Dairy in Winfield has been a help with lab testing, which Nolt doesn’t currently have on-site, he said. He remains friends with other milk bottling facilities nearby as well, such as Mapes Farm Fresh in New Berlin.
Twelve years ago, when he started looking for milk processing equipment, suppliers could barely sell their wares, he said. Fast forward to today and prices for milk processing equipment are two to four times what they were at that time, he added.
The demand for the creamery’s products has been high since it opened. Here, customers wait in line for ice cream served in waffle cones made on-site.
“I found out that (when looking at equipment), their technique is to tell you that it’s more work than you want to do. There is a reason — one in 10 will move through the process successfully, so they stress-test you pretty early to see how committed you are. I don’t know how many times in the last five years, as I was looking, I would call on any equipment that was advertised and get into long conversations,” said Nolt. “So, one thing you have to decide in your marketing plan (is) are you going to have your own sales point, or are you going to do on-farm production and go through a distribution system? Those are two big things that will really impact how you design from there. I didn’t want to do distribution for one main reason, and that’s distribution costs. I would rather stay small and operate my own point of sale. That’s just what I chose to do.”
Nolt said the demand for locally sourced and bottled milk is an interesting recent development.
“There’s a sort of a swinging back of the pendulum (with consumer interest),” he said.
The long line at the checkout counter recently was certainly evidence of strong local demand that day.
Summer hours for Old Mill Creamery are 9 a.m. to dusk, Monday through Saturday.
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Milkhouse Creamery prides itself on using vintage dairy equipment from the 1940s and 1950s to provide its customers with quality dairy products — including milk in glass bottles.
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