Experience Jackson

10/16/2026

"After I got the job at Jackson Crossing, people told me that there used to be a carousel. I had never seen it before, and I was going through some old archives, and I caught just a glimpse of it in the background of a picture, so I figured out what it looked like and went looking for it. It was about a two-year-long project. I found the horses in a storage room covered in dust, totally abandoned. I fell in love with them! I love anything old and with a story, so I pulled them out, dusted them off and put them out for the public to see. We didn’t know where any of the other parts were, so it was just the horses with some streamers coming down.

As time went on, I started finding other pieces to the carousel: the stage, the crown, the uprights, the cloth on top was rolled up in a ball under a couple sacks of cement. We had no idea how any of it went together. I contacted Bronner’s in Frankenmuth, and they sent some guys over. We ended up finding 100% of the pieces and rebuilt the entire thing! At the dedication, we let the public name the horses. We really wanted it to reflect Jackson.
We’re all about the community. We want to be known as the community gathering place, and so we're working hard to do that. We study the community and look at what the needs are and then move in that direction.

I love Jackson. I love the people in Jackson. I thought I was going to retire, so I moved here from San Antonio and bought a beautiful old house. A friend of mine who had worked for me for nine years had just lost his wife, so I said come on up here and get a job. He did, I wrote him a recommendation letter, and he got a job at Jackson Crossing. The general manager of the mall had read my recommendation letter and asked about me. He called me on the phone and said, ‘I gave my notice today, and I am out of here Sunday. You've got all the qualifications. Are you interested?’ I sent him my resume. He sent it to corporate, and I was working here the next week.

I love big projects and I see the mall as one big project. There are so many opportunities here, and every day I'm dreaming of something else that we could do or improve upon.

Every morning, we open the doors for the walkers at 8:30 for the walkers/ We have about 60 to 80 people that just walk. We also have become a hub of Jackson with all the new food vendors. We've got a lot of food options. Not just at the mall, but in the entire Jackson Crossing Mall area and that has brought this part of town to life.

Last year, on Black Friday, we estimated we had 25,000 people in the mall. The fire chief called me up and said, ‘I was out at the mall and I have never seen that place so vibrant, so warm and welcoming… and so many people.’ I thought we were in trouble, but he said, ‘I want to congratulate you. You have turned that place around. I am so proud, and I want you to know that my wife spent all my money there.’

Jackson Crossing is doing very well, every way you look at it."

—Jane Flores (right), General Manager, Jackson Crossing
1092 Jackson Crossing, Jackson, MI 49201

[Kay Pickett (left) story coming next week]

10/15/2026

Nite Lites Light Show is a family friendly drive through and walk through light display located at the Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Michigan.

See kid friendly, non scary, Halloween themed lights. Tune your vehicle's radio to a synchronized Halloween music while driving through the lights.

There are over 150 glowing displays, 7 light tunnels, and a train ride for $10 per person.

🎃 Dates:
October 1 – October 31, 2026
• Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays: 8PM – 10PM (Oct 1–23)
• Special Halloween Fun Walk (No cars allowed): October 24
• OPEN EVERYDAY: October 25 – October 31

🎃 Pricing / Admission:
• $30 per standard car/vehicle (per carload)
• $50 for limousines, motorhomes, and minibuses
• $100 for tour buses

🎃 Address: 12626 US-12, Brooklyn, MI 49230 (Michigan International Speedway)

10/15/2026

We're spending our afternoon at the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce's JAXPO event at American 1 Event Center (public hours are 3-5 pm). At our booth, we're asking guests to share the people, places and things they love about Jackson County. Have you visited lately? Share your favorite moments below so we can celebrate our neighbors today!

[Event link in comments]

10/13/2026

"I was working in a factory when COVID hit. I’ve always baked my family’s bread, and at the time, I was about six months into a sourdough journey. I had tried sourdough several times and it never really worked, but then the world shut down and I said, 'Well, I'm just going to practice my bread baking.' I quickly realized that there was no way that my family and I could eat that much bread, but then I saw everyone panicking about having enough food. There were a lot of people in dire straits, facing their jobs being taken away and the relative uncertainty going around the world. I thought that I could give the bread I was baking away as a way to help. I started baking bread and putting it out on my front porch and gave it away.

Then people began asking, 'Can we leave a donation so you can buy more flour?' I put a donation basket out and we’d average a couple of bucks per loaf, and it helped buy flour and other ingredients. We started doing different flavors of sourdough, and we quickly ramped up to baking 100 loaves of bread and doing bagels.

I always figured I would go back to work in the factory—I machined brake rotors. But a couple friends of mine run a place in Jackson called Lean Rocket Lab, and they reached out to me and said, 'Hey, man, you really need to make a business out of this.' I said I wasn’t really a business person. I didn’t know anything about being an entrepreneur. Then they said, 'We'll help you. Just keep making bread.' We started meeting on a weekly basis, and I started selling basically on the street corner in front of Lean Rocket Lab. I was making bread three days a week, and then I would go the next day and sell it on the street corner.

About five or six months into the process, I called the factory, told them I wasn’t coming back. DoughNation Bakery was born. We started in my garage, then moved into what is currently Vito’s Espresso. Working in their commercial kitchen allowed me to distribute my bread. We rapidly outgrew that space and a year later, moved into our current location and we’ve been here now for three years.

The first eight months of the life of the company were all donation based because I didn’t know how much money people had. It was important to me that they had food to eat. But once it became an actual business, I had to set a price—I said five dollars was the base price for everything. Now, obviously, the dollar is not worth what it used to be six years ago, but we try to keep the original spirit of the business alive by keeping our costs low by focusing on efficiency. Everything from the order in which we do things, of baking and making throughout the day, to the person running the machines—it's all about efficiency.

We make about 300 loaves of our regular sourdough bread a day, about 15 to 20 loaves of focaccia, 36 of our large sourdough loaves, and 680 bagels. We have nine locations, cafes and storefronts, around the Jackson area that sell our bread. There are some locations that don’t sell our bread to customers but use it in their food, like breakfast sandwiches or bagels.

It's a rather surreal experience; one I never would have expected this to happen. I feel extremely blessed. It is a never-ending journey of learning new techniques and methods for shaping different kinds of loaves, or what flavors might go in a loaf. The things that you can do with sourdough are really endless. We've gotten in such a hurry in this culture that we've forgotten how things used to be done. This is how bread has been made for 12,000 years. We're finding out more and more that the fermented foods that used to be eaten 100 years ago are really symbiotic with how our bodies function, and because we're not getting those, we are the sickest generation. We are full of chronic disease. If we actually ate those fermented foods and made our bread using a long, slow fermentation process, we’d be healthier people. I think that it's important that people realize that food is medicine. It’s better to eat high-quality food and know the guy who made it.

Naturally leavened sourdough bread has three ingredients in it: water, flour, and salt. It has a lower glycemic index and doesn't give you inflammation like store-bought bread will. I have a customer that drives all the way up here from Kentucky, loads her van up with 50 loaves of bread, and stocks her freezer with it because she's found out that it's the only bread she can eat. Otherwise, she breaks out in some weird rashes all over her body.

How cool is that? You can really change somebody's life with bread."

—Aaron Cole, DoughNation Bakery

10/11/2026

10/10/2026

Experience late 19th-century farm life with tours of the Waterloo Farm and Dewey School Museum, live music, sheep shearing, log hewing, a working c***r press, baking demonstrations and displays of traditional crafts and trades.

10/10/2026

ONE week 'til Brooklyn!

Irish Hills Gravel returns Saturday, October 17, 2026, with a start and finish at Michigan International Speedway. Ride scenic backroads, enjoy local vibes and celebrate community on two wheels.

10/09/2026

10/09/2026

"I'm a third-generation rink operator. It goes back to my grandfather, who was looking for ideas during the Depression on how to earn a living for his family. I've got a book somewhere at home with all of his ideas in it. One of them was a skating center. He ended up owning several of them. He'd build them up, sell them and go start another one… and keep going like that.

And then my mom and dad met at his skating center in Adrian, Michigan. The story was there was a sq**rt gun fight going on, my grandfather saw him and said, 'You're out!'

My mom and dad got out of the skating business for a little while, and then they decided to get back in because they really missed it. My family opened up one in Jackson, Michigan. Eventually, my dad sold the business to me and my sister. After 10 years, she wanted to retire so I bought her out.

I just love what I do. I think it's the joy I see on people's faces, an opportunity for me to meet new people. Personally, I'm a Christian, and I was blessed to be put in this position, to have this really cool place. I just want to bring God glory by whatever I do here and just share goodness with everybody.

It's a blast. It's a great time. It's great for families. We've been here a long time, so we've been through some hard times with the economy and stuff as well, but lately there’s been a bit of resurgence. I think skating is great for people of all ages. I’m 67 and I still get out there and skate. I just love it and it gives you this really good feeling. It’s social, gets people interacting with each other. It’s physical activity and a great activity for families to do together. And who doesn’t need a little more fun in their life?

We take a lot of pride in our facility. We have a hardwood floor; something not a lot of skating rinks have these days. I know because I helped put that floor in one board in at a time. I know every board! We worked 16 hours a day, about two and a half weeks, to get that in. And we get a lot of people that come in here, and they just love it. It brings back memories and nostalgia of what skating rinks used to be like.

We’re proud of the facility, but we also want it to be safe for families. We were one of the first rinks to institute a no smoking rule, and a security buzzer at the door so nobody gets in without us knowing. It’s very secure, and knowing that helps families have fun. I tell my staff all the time that supervision is a cornerstone for operations. People trust us with their children here, so we remind our staff that it's important to be observant.

But along with safety, we always want to be fun. We're always trying to think outside the box and come up with new ways to entertain people. We’re expanding all the time and do fun field trips in our classroom with several interactive STEM lessons explaining how roller skate work, how the music comes out of the speakers, the lasers in laser tag and things like that.

We really want people to be treated like we want to be treated, and to have fast and friendly, efficient service, and we want the people who pay to feel good about this place. People work for their money, so when they come in and plunk down that money to come in, we need to show them a good time. We want to be a top destination in people's minds. What am I going to do with my family tonight? Where can I go? Our goal is to be top of mind for anybody that wants to come in, and we want to deliver.

I hope what we do brings people joy."

—Mark Oliver, AllSkate Fun Center