A free, pure cider-mill stop with the longest published 2026 season in metro Detroit - September 5 to November 29 - and nothing to do beyond watching the press, eating donuts and feeding the ducks.
Admission is free. You pay only for cider, donuts, caramel apples, roasted corn and market goods. Bulk cider and donut orders can be placed for events.
Free to walk in. Your spend here is whatever you choose — pumpkins, food, and any paid activities. That makes it a low-risk stop if you are not sure how long the kids will last.
Franklin does one thing and does not pretend otherwise. There is a historic water wheel, an open cider press you can watch running, a donut line, a market, an Apple Shack, and a river with ducks in it. No corn maze. No u-pick. No hayride, no play barn, no wristband. If you arrive expecting the kind of gated farm-fair that Wiard’s or Westview run, you will have finished the visit in twenty minutes and wondered what the fuss was.
Taken as what it is, though, it is one of the better fall stops in Oakland County, and it is free.
Among metro Detroit mills this is the one with a firm, published 2026 window: Saturday September 5 to Sunday November 29. Most farms in the region either give a start date and no end, or leave both blank. Franklin gives you both, and the end is a month past Halloween.
That matters more than it sounds. Michigan frost ends the corn maze season; mazes come down, weekend attractions shut, and by mid-November the fall-farm map has largely emptied. Franklin keeps pressing. November weekdays here are the quietest good cider you will get in the region, and the mill opens on Thanksgiving morning itself, 8:00am to noon, which is exactly when you would want a gallon of fresh cider and a couple of dozen donuts.
Nothing at the gate. The whole budget is the counter, and for a family of four you are realistically looking at cider, a bag of donuts, a couple of caramel apples and maybe roasted corn - somewhere in the twenty to thirty-five dollar range depending on appetite, and nothing at all if you only want to watch.
That makes Franklin the lowest-risk option on the list for anyone travelling with a toddler whose mood is unpredictable. There is no sunk cost. If it goes badly, you leave.
The mill runs 8:00am to 6:00pm daily. The Franklin Market and the Apple Shack close half an hour earlier, at 5:30pm. Thanksgiving Day is the exception: 8:00am to noon.
The 8:00am open is the single most useful piece of planning information on this page. Early arrival for the donut queue is the standard local advice, and it is sound - a mill with no admission gate has nothing to meter arrivals, so the crowd concentrates at the counter rather than spreading across a site. By late morning on an October Saturday, with the weekend jazz playing, the queue is the experience. At 8:15am it is not.
Live mellow jazz on weekends is a genuine feature and gives you a reason to sit rather than buy and leave. It is also a crowd multiplier. If a short, quiet visit is what you want, go on a weekday morning; if you want an hour sitting outside with cider and music, the weekend is the point and the queue is the price.
The duck feeding by the river is the thing to know about. It is the traditional way to occupy a small child while another adult stands in the donut line, and it is free entertainment on a site with no play equipment. The working water wheel does similar duty for anyone who finds machinery interesting.
Beyond that, be realistic: there is nothing to climb on and nothing to ride. Franklin is a forty-five-minute visit with a four-year-old, not a morning.
An 8:00am arrival in mid-November in southeast Michigan is genuinely cold, and standing outdoors watching a press does not warm you up. Layers rather than a single jacket. October is the wet month, and any overflow parking at a mill this busy will be on softer ground than the main lot, so shoes you do not mind.
The 2026 season runs Saturday September 5 to Sunday November 29, open daily 8:00am to 6:00pm. The 8:00am opening is the whole strategy here: arrive early and the donut queue is short, arrive at 11:00am on an October Saturday and it is the defining feature of your visit. November is the underrated window - the mill runs a full month past Halloween, when most Michigan farms have shut and the crowds have gone.
Forty-five minutes to an hour. This is a stop, not an afternoon, and there is no attraction here that will absorb more time than that unless you sit and listen to the weekend jazz.
Free entry, a metro Detroit address and a famous donut counter make October weekends busy, and the weekend live jazz adds to it rather than spreading it out. The 8:00am open is the pressure valve. November weekdays are quiet.
Not published. Assume a lot rather than a field given the roadside location, but expect it to fill on an October Saturday and expect the overflow to be on soft ground after rain.
Not published. The mill, market and Apple Shack are built structures; the riverside duck-feeding area is outdoors and its surface is not described. Call 248-626-8261 if this is a deciding factor.
You have children who need to do something. There is no corn maze, no u-pick, no rides and no play area at Franklin - it is a mill, a market and an apple shack. A family expecting a farm day will be back in the car in half an hour.
Yates Cider Mill in Rochester Hills is the other free historic water-powered mill in Oakland County, roughly a half-hour drive, and it adds a petting zoo, pony rides and river trails plus a dog-friendly policy Franklin does not publish. Doing both in a morning is realistic given how short a Franklin visit is.
Saturday September 5 through Sunday November 29, 2026. The mill runs 8:00am to 6:00pm daily, the Franklin Market and Apple Shack 8:00am to 5:30pm, and Thanksgiving Day is 8:00am to noon only.
No. Admission is free. You pay only for cider, donuts, caramel apples, roasted corn and market goods.
No. Franklin is a cider mill rather than a farm-attraction park. The activities are watching the cider being pressed and the donuts being made, the historic water wheel, duck feeding by the river, weekend live jazz, the market and the Apple Shack.
As close to the 8:00am opening as you can manage, particularly on October weekends. Early arrival for the donut line is the standard advice at this mill, and the weekend jazz draws additional crowds later in the day.
September 5 – November 29, 2026. Daily. Hours: Mill 8:00am-6:00pm daily; Franklin Market 8:00am-5:30pm; Apple Shack 8:00am-5:30pm; Thanksgiving Day 8:00am-12:00pm.
Admission is free. Admission is free. You pay only for cider, donuts, caramel apples, roasted corn and market goods. Bulk cider and donut orders can be placed for events.
7450 Franklin Road, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48301, in Oakland County. It is one of 10 patches we track in Metro Detroit.
We track 10 patches in Metro Detroit, 9 of which are free to walk into. Entry here costs nothing, which puts it in the minority even in a region with several free options.
Its season runs about 86 days against a regional average of 84, so it is broadly in line with the rest of the region.
There are 4 other patches we track in Oakland County. All Metro Detroit patches →
Map pin is set to the town centre. Navigate to the street address above, not the pin.
franklincidermill.com
Checked August 2026.