A hit with race car enthusiasts, the Empire Hill Climb takes place Saturday, Sept. 16, at 8 a.m. Learn more on this Facebook page.
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The Tin Can Tourists free open house is open to the public on Saturday, Sept. 16, from noon to 3 p.m. at Indigo Bluffs RV Resort, which is located 3 miles east of Empire on M-72.
After five years of primarily growing apples and nurturing their garden along, Tom and Christy Wiesen, with help from daughter Sofia, are already thriving in their first year of selling produce. After being hop growers who helped their family start the hop farm along M-72, Tom and Christy decided to branch out on their own with fruit and produce.
The first annual LivelyLands is about to kick off, Aug. 25-27, at the 5-acre Lively farm off Bow Road, just one mile south of Big Glen Lake. Headlining acts include Austin favorite The Deer and northern Michigan songster Seth Bernard.
Nobody knows the value of sharing creative expression quite like Rebecca Willis. Willis and her partner, Jim, love living in Empire, but found themselves at a loss for space when it came to working on their various art projects. In a decision to improve their situation, the couple found a spot in November 2015 that they originally saw as a personal studio, but additionally opened to the public during the 2016 Asparagus Festival as “JoJo and Bucky’s,” a place where tourists and locals alike can shop while also seeing working artists in action.
“With any business, you have [worry and doubt],” said Steve Nowicki about opening his Shipwreck Café in Empire late this spring. “We had all of our eggs in one basket. We put everything into this and if it didn’t work out we didn’t know what we were going to do.”
Chocolate making is an incredible journey. For Grocer’s Daughter this journey starts in Ecuador. Near the small town of Calceta, in western Ecuador, sits the Fortaleza Del Valle cocoa cooperative. Nearly 900 small, family cacao farms rely on the cooperative to obtain expensive Fair Trade and Organic certifications, carefully process their beans and ensure that they will be sold for a fair, living wage.
Photos courtesy of Empire Area Museum By Linda Alice Dewey Sun contributor Part of our series on prominent but derelict or vacant buildings in our region. If you were around this area in the late 1960s, ’70s or ’80s, you might remember the old Ace hardware store located at the end of Front Street, adjacent […]
An Empire real estate development firm has cleared the first hurdle in developing a vacant three-acre strip of properties at the end of Lake Street. The complex would include the old Salisbury/Ace hardware store, the white house just south of it, the livery barn on the corner of Lake and Niagara, a house across Niagara Street to the north, and a quarter mile strip of land along South Bar Lake.
Empire holds its 40th Anchor Day Festival on Saturday, July 15, with a parade, a street dance, a fun run, a quilt show, a movie and a chicken dinner.