Plainwell Ice Cream: 40,000 gallons a year from one corner shop

The corner of Bridge and Broad Streets in downtown Plainwell has been selling ice cream for so long that the building outlasted the two rival ice cream companies that fought over the town in the first place. The shop started as Newman’s, opened in the 1950s by a man who’d jumped ship from a cross-town competitor, Dean’s. Plainwell, it turns out, was an ice cream town with a feud.

In 1978 the Gaylord family bought the old Newman’s and renamed it Plainwell Ice Cream Co. They have run it ever since — three generations now, scooping behind the same counter. What keeps it more than a nostalgia stop is that they actually make the stuff, in small batches, right there. Somewhere around 40,000 gallons a year come out of that one corner shop, in about 53 flavors.

It has quietly grown past its own front door, too. You don’t have to drive to Plainwell to eat it: their ice cream turns up in scoop shops and freezers across a wide stretch of southwest Michigan, from Holland over to Battle Creek and down to Paw Paw — a couple dozen spots carrying a brand made in a town most people pass on the highway without stopping.

But the corner store is still the point. There’s a particular small-town ritual to it: the line out the door on a hot July evening, kids deciding between blue moon and Superman like it’s a life decision, the screen door slapping shut, someone walking back to the car already losing a race against a melting cone. The Gaylords have been the keepers of that ritual in Plainwell for more than four decades, on the same corner where the town’s ice cream war started before they ever showed up.