The Weekend That Turns Franklin From Summer to Fall

Ask anyone in Franklin when fall starts and they will point to Labor Day weekend without checking a calendar. What most residents do not know is how recently that became true, or how much shorter the season has actually gotten.

For most of the twentieth century, the Franklin Cider Mill ran on a much longer clock. When Robert McKee bought the property in 1918, he stipulated that the cider season would open on August 15 and run until January 1, nearly five months of pressing. This year, the mill's fall opening lands on Saturday, September 5, and the season closes the first weekend after Thanksgiving. That is a run of about twelve weeks, roughly seven weeks shorter than the four-and-a-half-month season McKee built into the deed a century ago. Nobody advertises that contraction. It shows up only if you compare the old stipulation to the current calendar, which almost nobody does, because the mill has always just been there in September, the way it is now.

What has changed is that the mill's shortened season now lands on the exact same three-day weekend as the village's other anchor institution: the Franklin Community Association's Labor Day Round Up. That overlap, not the weather, is what actually flips Franklin from summer to fall.

Two Institutions, One Weekend

The math is tight enough that it's worth laying out plainly.

The mill's press starts turning apples into cider on the Saturday of the holiday weekend. Two days later, the Franklin Community Association closes down a stretch of Franklin Road for its 81st annual Round Up, Parade, and Art in the Village fine art show. It is a two-day gap between the first fresh cider of the season and the parade that most people treat as the unofficial start of fall, and it repeats every year on purpose. The mill's own address technically sits in Bloomfield Hills, a quirk of postal boundaries that has never once stopped anyone in the village from claiming the mill as entirely their own.

The mill itself predates both institutions by decades. The building started as a grist mill in 1832, sat unfinished for years after its original builder ran into money trouble, and was finally completed and opened by Peter VanEvery in 1837. Ownership changed hands several times before the Peltz family took over in the 1960s. Jacob Peltz ran it for close to 35 years until his death in 2004, his son Berry continued the operation, and today Peltz's granddaughter, Melanee Peltz Radner, runs the mill as a fourth-generation family business. Each side of the press holds up to sixty bushels of apples, which means a single full pressing turns roughly 120 bushels into cider, a detail that becomes obvious only if you stand at the viewing window on a Saturday when the mill is running two or three presses back to back.

What the Round Up Actually Involves

The Round Up is not a small backyard gathering. It is the FCA's biggest event of the year, held on the four-acre park the association owns in the heart of the village, and this year marks its 81st annual run.

The parade itself starts at noon and travels down Franklin Road from Evelyn Ct to Carol St. To clear the route, the village closes a longer stretch of Franklin Road, from 14 Mile to Carol, from about 11:15 a.m. to 1 p.m. Around it, the Round Up runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. with midway games, pony and horse rides, a petting farm, and food from the Franklin church's grill line, while Art in the Village runs a separate track from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with more than fifty artists showing jewelry, glass, painting, photography, and sculpture alongside live music.

None of this happens by accident. Franklin's other civic-minded nonprofit, Main Street Franklin, runs a separate slate of downtown events across the year, from a summer block party to the Franklinstein Frenzy in October and Sip, Shop, and Stroll in December, all built around keeping foot traffic in the village's handful of storefronts. Village Trustee Pam Hansen, describing the spirit behind that broader calendar of community events, put it simply:

"It brings out families and it is a great community effort."

That sentiment applies just as well to the Round Up as it does to any of Main Street Franklin's own programming. Two organizations, two separate calendars, one shared instinct to keep the village's 2.66 square miles and roughly 3,150 residents gathering in the same four acres of park and the same stretch of Franklin Road, year after year.

The Building That Sat Empty

The one genuinely new variable in this year's Labor Day weekend is where people eat before or after the parade.

For sixteen years, the anchor restaurant in the village was the Franklin Grill, tucked into a carriage house on Franklin Road that dates to the 1840s and originally served as the local blacksmith and carriage shop. When it closed in January 2024, the building sat empty for more than a year, a fact locals noticed every time they walked past the darkened windows on their way to Tangerine Wine or the village boutiques.

The property was eventually purchased by Jay Farner, the former CEO and vice chair of Rocket Companies and founder of Ronin Capital Partners, who bought the original carriage house along with the adjoining lot next door. What has opened in its place is not another version of the old tavern. The Franklin Oyster Bar and Eatery leans into a coastal identity that has more in common with a Charleston oyster house or a Napa Valley wine bar than with the New American menu the space used to carry. Lead designer Nicole McGrail worked with the village's Historic District Commission to preserve the building's colonial shutters and gas lanterns while reworking the interior, and the kitchen sources Wagyu beef from a specialty farm in West Michigan alongside a raw bar built around sustainably sourced oysters. The adjoining property is slated to become a smaller grab-and-go cafe for sandwiches, flatbreads, and coffee, filling out the block rather than competing with it.

For a village this size, with only a handful of full-service restaurants inside its borders, a change like this reshapes where an entire evening happens. Anyone stopping by the cider mill on Saturday and staying in the village through the parade on Monday is choosing a fundamentally different dinner than they would have three years ago.

The Five Weeks Between Now and the Parade

Between today and Labor Day weekend, the village keeps its usual rhythm. The farmers market continues to run Sundays at the village gazebo, a tradition Main Street Franklin originally launched and the FCA now operates. The Franklin Public Library has its own steady calendar of small, specific programs, from a mid-August walking group that meets on the village streets to evening craft sessions for kids. None of it is dramatic. All of it is what actually fills the five weeks before the mill's press starts and the parade closes Franklin Road for ninety minutes.

That is really the whole point. Franklin does not need a marketing campaign to signal the change of seasons. It has a cider press that has run for the better part of two centuries and a parade that has marched for 81 years running, and this year, for the first time, a very different restaurant waiting at the end of both.

If you already live in Franklin, none of this changes anything about your address. It just means the two days between the mill's first pressing and the parade's noon start are worth clearing your calendar for, the way they have been worth clearing for longer than anyone currently walking that parade route has been alive.

If you are thinking about what a move into or out of this village might look like, from timing a sale around the fall calendar to understanding what a property near the historic district actually carries with it, Christine Hossack works with Franklin and the surrounding Bloomfield communities regularly and is glad to talk through what that would mean for your particular property. Let's Connect.