Town, village and business reporter {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. AUBURN — The Weed family business is a balancing act between continuing tradition and changing times. That business, New Hope Mills Store & Cafe, dates back more than two centuries.
While the 181 York St. space opened in 2003 and expanded in 2017, New Hope Mills began with a gristmill built in 1823 by Judge Charles Kellogg, a relative of the cereal family. It still sits in the serenity of a rural, wooded location along Bear Swamp Creek in Niles, close to Skaneateles Lake.
Brothers Howard and Leland Weed purchased the mill in 1947, and in 2013, their grandson Doug Weed took over the business from his father, Dale. "Everything has been my fault since that," he said with a laugh as he and his sister Dawn Korbel spoke with The Citizen on Tuesday in one of the cafe's booths. The gristmill, which produced flour, and a sawmill are now on the National Register of Historic Places as the New Hope Mills Complex.
But for Weed and Korbel, they're still home. They have fond memories of the mills, like lunches by the waterfalls or visiting their grandmother's house. But they also had nonnegotiable work to do there, like shoveling grain out of trucks and cleaning.
“In a family business," he said, "you wear all the hats." Where Cayuga County Eats is a new monthly feature in The Citizen highlighting the "hidden gem" restaurants of the area. To suggest .