The Fountain Run Mill has seen its share of owners and sold a lot of feed since it opened in 1870, but come mid-September, it will be operated by Ann Fife as a restaurant.

“It’s going to be home cooking,” Fife said. “Real home cooking. I’m going to be open six days a week. Homemade biscuits, homemade gravy, steam table for lunch, plus orders. Just a country kitchen, I guess you could call it.”

Ann and her husband, Scott Fife, bought the building five years ago when it was put up for auction.

“We really liked the building, but it was in such bad shape it couldn’t be saved,” she said. “So for $2,500 we bought the old mill and about a half an acre of land here. It sat here for several years. In the meantime, our building started kind of leaning and we thought ‘well, we better tear it down before it falls on somebody. If we make it tearing it down, maybe we can build back.’ We just started building back on it in April and this is where we’ve got to.”

Ann and Scott weren’t able to save the building, but they salvaged most of the materials. The new restaurant is built with mostly wood from the old mill.

“Everything that you see here came out of the mill,” she said. “The lumber you see here (on the back wall) is from the 1870s’ part of the mill. It was under the roof. It’s what they used for the sheeting on the roof. The walls in the men’s restroom are the walls that were in the part of the mill that sat here, just old barn lumber. The women’s restroom I really like a lot because it’s made out of the flour house where they would grind flour.”

The wood from the flour house was fit tightly together so rodents couldn’t get into the flour.

Ann said that many people in the community remember coming to the mill to buy flour or grind feed when they were children.

“The electrical inspector from Monroe County was here today and he said he could remember coming here as little boy — he’s 70-something — to get flour ground,” she said. “He said it was a big deal to get to come here. If your family’s from Monroe County, Barren or Allen around here, your ancestors walked on these floors because everybody traded here. It was a flour mill, a corn meal mill, it was an animal feed mill. It was a big thing around here then. There’s a lot of history.”

Ann said that she wants the restaurant to be a place for people to gather and learn about Fountain Run.

“Fountain Run used to be a happening place,” she said. “They used to say you couldn’t walk down the streets at midnight because there would be so many people on the streets. A guy told me the other day you could run a cannon ball down the street at noon and never hit nobody.”

“We just kind of wanted to preserve some of the history of the town and this is what we ended up with,” Ann said.