Red vs. Blue

I was lucky enough to find this coin on eBay

My recent Festiva trip included a stop at a few interesting places in addition to every operating G.D. Ritzy's, including Farmstead, a former Nickerson Farms location. Nickerson Farms was one of many early travel oases that popped up along the newly constructed American Interstate Highway system in the sixties. The company was founded by I.J. Nickerson¹, a former Stuckey’s franchisee who struck out on his own after he was not allowed to open a full service restaurant in a Stuckey’s. Nickerson Farms restaurants had its own distinctive architecture including a prominent, brightly-colored roof, allowing the buildings themselves to be highly visible from nearby highways, not unlike similar businesses of the era, including Stuckey's as well as Howard Johnson's and Horne's. Locations included steeply pitched red roofs and faux-Tudor accents. The business model was similar to Stuckey’s, including a gift shop and gas pumps (under a red pyramid-shaped canopy) as well as a full service restaurant. Instead of Stuckey’s pecans, Nickerson Farms was known for its honey, often produced on site at each location by live bees in a large plexiglass hive. Stuckey’s still exists and seems to be on its way back to its former greatness, but near as I can tell, the Nickerson Farms name disappeared sometime in the mid eighties. Many of the buildings, however, are still around, converted to serve new purposes. I know of one location that became a church. Another became a porn shop.

I’ve visited two former Nickerson’s location in the past year, Fowlerville Farms in Fowlerville, Michigan, which I covered here, and more recently Farmstead in Marengo, Ohio. While neither provides a complete picture of what shopping and dining at Nickerson Farms would have been like, combined they come pretty close to my estimation of an authentic Nickerson experience.

Repurposed Nickerson Farms signage in Michigan

And in Ohio

Culinarily speaking, Fowlerville Farms is the nearest to Nickerson Farms.  Their current menu is very close to the old Nickerson Farms menu, featuring fried chicken, pot roast, and other comfort foods. Like Nickerson Farms, Fowlerville Farms is open for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and well into the night, opening at 5 AM and closing at 11 PM every day. The beehive is long-gone, but every entree comes with a small loaf of fresh baked bread and house-made honey butter, as they would have in the Nickerson days. While it's no longer produced on site, local honey is still available for sale in the gift shop. As far as I can tell, Fowlerville Farms has been in business continuously since it opened as a Nickerson Farms in 1969. When they lost the Nickerson name, they painted the roof blue and put up new signs and kept on going as if nothing, or at least very little, had changed.

Where Fowlerville Farms fails to capture the Nickerson Farms experience, is its building. Fowlerville Farms is housed in an atypical building with a smaller than usual footprint of a Nickerson Farms location, perhaps due to its rural location or real estate restrictions. While it's nice to see the Tudor treatments are still present outside, the interior has been thoroughly remodeled, and as I mentioned before, the signature red roof is now blue. There are still gas pumps, but they’re under a modern canopy.

Farmstead, on the other hand, retains its original red roof, gas canopy (Albeit without pumps; Farmstead doesn’t sell gas) and is a more standard, large footprint building. The interior also seems fairly close to the pictures I’ve seen of Nickerson Farms interiors, with many dark-stained turned wood spindles acting as room dividers, and booths upholstered in quilted Naugahyde. Pictures of agricultural scenes adorn the walls certainly feel original, but I can’t verify that’s the case. The only significant updates at Farmstead are renovated bathrooms (which are much larger and more practical than the single-user facilities in Fowlerville) and vinyl siding replacing the Tudor treatment on the few exterior surfaces of the building that are not part of the roof. It’s as close to an original Nickerson Farms building in operable condition as you could hope to find.

 

The Tudor panels aren't enough for me to ignore the Marathon gas canopy and blue roof.

The dream of the sixties is alive in Marengo, Ohio.

Sneaky picture of the dining room

Even if the tractor picture isn't original Nickerson decor, it feels like it belongs. 

Farmstead’s downfall is their menu and operating hours. They’re open only from 8 AM to 2 PM, unusual for a restaurant visible from a busy interstate. The menu is also basic, and breakfast and lunch are served during separate hours. I came in at 9 AM and was handed a single-page breakfast menu. I suspect the lunch menu isn’t much bigger. With that degree of simplicity and limited hours, I would have expected to be able to order pancakes at noon or a Reuben sandwich at 8:30, but such is not the case under this red roof.

Fowlerville Farms has the ideal menu and business model. Farmstead has the ideal building. If I had unlimited wealth, I’d buy both places, and transplant the entire Fowlerville Farms operation, including the kitchen, menu, and staff in the Farmstead building. I’d put in vintage gas pumps, just for show and get the beehive operational again. I’d hire a team of lawyers to defend me in lawsuits filed by patrons stung by bees. I’d sell only the cheesiest souvenirs, and hand out free bumper stickers, Wall Drug style. Who wants to invest?

I'd totally accept old Nickerson Farms good luck coins too, because I'm a low-level hoarder.

If you're interested in Nickerson Farms, there's an entire blog devoted to it here. It's run by a former employee and includes a list of the location of every Nickerson Farms. There may just be a location still standing near you.

1. No one on the internet seems to know what the "I.J." in I.J. Nickerson stands for. I am therefore forced to assume I.J. is short for Infinite Jest.

Retro Roadtrip Part 1: Bees‽

Winter in Michigan is a maddening mix of alternating blizzards and thaws that occur in succession just slow enough that you forget about the existence of grass in between thaws. After a while, it all blends together into gray slush, thanks in no small part to the roads being inundated with enough rock salt to eat through the rocker panels of the average vehicle before it's even paid off. It's mid-February, and my tenth northern winter is drawing to a close. To celebrate, I took a trip. 

The American highway was a vastly different place fifty, even fifteen years ago. Urban sprawl was less sprawled. Chain restaurants, hotels, and gas stations were less ubiquitous, and the signs and buildings you'd see along the highways were completely different. I found myself with a free weekend, and with that free weekend, I decided to take a quick overnight trip, and patronize as many historical businesses as I could. (Historical, for the purposes of this blog shall henceforth be defined as having some past connection to an existing or defunct chain.) I get properly geeked out by visiting a business that used to be something else and finding little clues to the building's original use. There is an entire blog as well as a subreddit devoted to this. See Not Fooling Anybody and /r/notfoolinganybody. In the case of this trip, I set out to experience the closest possible facsimiles to experiences that I missed out on due to pesky things like chronology and geography.

My first stop, was Fowlerville Farms in Fowlerville, Michigan, about halfway between Detroit and Lansing along I-96. Fowlerville Farms is a gas station, truck stop, convenience store, and full-service restaurant all under one roof. It began life as a location of the now completely extinct Nickerson Farms chain. Nickerson Farms was the brainchild of I.J. Nickerson, a Stuckey's franchisee who started his own chain of proto-travel plazas in the mid sixties when Stuckey's wouldn't allow him to oprate a full-service restaurant in a Stuckey's location. At their peak, Fowlerville Farms had sixty or so locations, mostly along interstate highways. The steeply pitched red roofs on their Tudor-style buildings were easy to recognize. There isn't a lot of information about Nickerson Farms online, but near as I can tell, there were no locations left by the mid eighties. Like a lot of the chains that sprung up along the newly-built American Interstate system, the various fuel crises in the seventies, and the rise of national fast food chains slowly eroded the customer base and profit until they were forced to close their doors. Fowlerville Farms is an anomaly. Once the Nickerson Farms chain was no more, they simply changed their name, painted their red roof blue, and continued business as usual.

  


I stopped in for dinner and a tank of gas. While the building has undergone several renovations, it's basic layout is still the same. It feels small compared to a modern truck stop. The building is essentially split in half with a small convenience store on one side, and a restaurant on the other. The menu is fairly expansive, and I've never had a bad meal there. The ceiling is high and vaulted on the inside with exposed rafters. It makes sense that I've seen pictures of at least one former Nickerson Farms location turned into a church. A gimmick Nickerson Farms employed when they were in business was having live bees in a working plexiglass beehive producing honey for use in the restaurant and to be sold in the convenience store. There's no signs of bees at Fowlerville Farms, I imagine because intentionally having a large number of live bees on site sounds like it could only end with litigation. Still, a meal at Fowlerville Farms comes with hot bread with house-made honey butter, and you can buy honey from local farms in the classic plastic bear container at the register. Until recently, I assumed Fowlerville Farms to be the closest I could come to getting a modern-day Nickerson Farms experience, but I've recently heard of another former Nickerson's, still with a red roof and original gas canopy operating as a restaurant in central Ohio, but that's another blog entry. Stay tuned.

There's at least one Nickerson Farms fan blog out there with decent information including a list of every known Nickerson's location. If you're intrigued, or at least not completely bored by Nickerson Farms, stick around for my next entry about where I spent the night.