ROCK FALLS — When the town goes to sleep, Jim Helle is just starting his day.

It’s the life of being in the baking business, and that’s what three generations of Helle’s family have done for 84 years.

Helle keeps the family baking traditions alive as owner of Folsom’s Bakery in Rock Falls. While he’s a Helle, he has the Folsom genes: his grandfather Lawson “Red” Folsom kneaded his first batch of dough in 1942, and his uncle Jerry followed in Lawson’s floured footsteps in a long baking career as well.

At the heart of the family legacy is a tried and true way of making donuts fresh each morning: from scratch and one ingredient at a time. It’s a tradition that’s beginning to fade from the baking industry, Helle said, but one that he’s proud to uphold, while still keeping up with the times. He’s expanded the business in recent years to the wholesale market, baking bread and buns for businesses throughout northern Illinois, all while navigating the challenges that come with running a small business.

Machines do much of the work these days, but even with mechanical helpers, Helle still takes matters into his own hands. The former welder will fix the mixers and other machines himself, rather than outsource the work.

“I think about how Grandpa used to cut donuts by hand, and I can’t even imagine doing it now,” Helle said. “Grandpa had smaller mixers and stuff like that. It’s little things like that and how things have changed, and how we’ve had to change, because times change. If I don’t change a little bit, the big box stores are going to wipe us out.”

Folsom’s makes and sells donuts, cookies, cakes and bread, all with a busy fleet of stainless steel machines and pieces of equipment from the family’s past, including a cast iron Duchess machine his grandfather used.

Since the coronavirus pandemic, Helle has expanded in recent years to include pizza and cold cut sandwiches. Pizza is served from noon to 7 p.m. Fridays, with a from-scratch crust and a little inspiration from the former Gig’s Pizza in town, with sausage crumbles instead of chunks, he said.

“We’ve had hiccups that Covid brought, and I was trying to find more ways to make money to pay bills,” Helle said. “I talked with my wholesale customers and they kept telling me to make pizza. I started working on a pizza dough recipe. I knew what I wanted. I wanted something different.”

When he began expanding distribution, buns for Italian beef sandwiches were the first order of business, and an Amboy business was the first order. Joe Mazzarisi, owner of Maria’s Pizza in Amboy, needed a sturdy bun that could stand up to gravy-soaked beef.

“It took a couple of trials and errors, but I made it work,” Helle said. “It was a hit. It was a home run.”

Today, Folsom’s supplies buns for Arthur’s Deli sandwiches and distributes throughout the Rockford area, the Quad Cities, the La Salle-Peru area and DeKalb County. In mid-February, the bakery produced 1,200 paczki shells for a bakery in Sandwich, ahead of Fat Tuesday.

To keep pace, Helle added a 30-by-30-foot back building in September 2025, relieving what had become a space crunch in the kitchen. The extra space allows him to buy ingredients by the skid, trimming costs and stabilizing supply. In the kitchen, three mixers hum — the largest capable of handling 325 pounds of dough at once — alongside a cookie machine that can turn out 1,300 cookies or 6,000 thumbprints in a day.

Even with all the machines, there’s still a lot of labor in the mix. Fifty-pound bags of flour are hoisted into mixers, and Helle’s days can stretch to 18 hours. Even at home with his life partner, Helen Heckman, he’s often planning the next batch.

He approaches baking like a science, weighing and recalibrating recipes to preserve the bakery’s signature made-from-scratch taste. “You’re using flour, sugar, salt, milk or white powder and shortening — that’s from scratch,” Helle said. “When you go with a mix … the quality is not there. It’s not the same taste.”

While Folsom’s slogan is “Family tradition since 1942,” the business itself doesn’t have 84 candles on its freshly made birthday cake.

The family tradition of baking stretches back to World War II, when Lawson started work in 1942 at Cameron’s Bakery and Luncheonette at 319 First Ave. in Sterling. He later worked at the Federal Bakery in town, and then for a brief time at Jul’s Danish Farm in Rock Falls. By 1958 he was ready to strike out on his own, and he and a business partner opened Avenue Bakery in the former Cameron’s location. When the partnership dissolved two years later, Folsom’s Bakery was born, lasting until 1968, when a rent increase pushed Lawson out of business. He later worked for SuperValu as a consultant for the establishment of bakeries at its grocery stores, and also worked for a time at Tiffany Bakery at Northland Mall in the early 1970s.

Helle, whose mother Karen is a daughter of Lawson’s, recalls spending quality time as a young child with Grandpa while he worked at the Mall.

“I remember spending my summers going out with Grandpa and being out there,” Helle said. “We’d spend all night out there, and when we got done we’d go down to the river and fish for several hours, go back to his place and take a nap, and I’d go back [to work] with him the next day.”

Lawson’s son, Jerry, worked for his father at the original Folsom’s until it closed in 1968, before moving on to McCaslin’s Bakery when Kenny McCaslin opened it the same year on West Third Street in downtown Sterling. Jerry and his then-wife Barb worked at various times over the years for McCaslin’s, which relocated a few blocks east in 1976; and that’s also where Helle worked his first job, washing dishes and mopping floors for Kenny in the mid-1980s.

When McCaslin’s closed in 1999, Jerry, who by then was bakery manager at County Market in Sterling, resurrected the family business in Rock Falls — coincidentally in a location that shared the same address as the family business in Sterling: 319 First Ave. — with Roxanne and sons J.J. and Jason. Helle worked for a brief time at the new Folsom’s and later came back to the business as a part-owner in 2007 when Jerry, who also taught baking classes at Sauk Valley Community College, Lewis University in Romeoville and Dixon Correctional Center, retired.

Helle assumed sole ownership a few years later. He keeps in touch with family members, as well as the McCaslins. Their advice has helped a great deal, including when the Food and Drug Administration began its ban on trans fats in 2015.

“That messed up all of our recipes,” Helle said. “The trans fat was everything. They told me to go back to the drawing board. They told me what to start using again. I adjusted my shortening and did a lot of adjustments and rebuilt everything back to what it needed to be.

“It’s actually better now with the way I had to rebuild it.”

The trans fat overhaul forced him to rethink formulas he had grown up with, reinforcing what the older bakers had always preached: adapt or get left behind.

“Kenny told me years ago to just keep up,” Helle said. “Once you get it in your head, no one can ever take it away from you. When I came back, I met with Kenny and he said, ‘You know, son, you made it a complete circle.’ I told him, ‘It was meant to be.’ God put me on this journey, and he knew I’d be here.”

Helle’s staff continues the work he begins in the wee hours of the morning, both in the kitchen and at the front counter. Lisa Hughes works in both settings, serving customers their favorite treats from the cases, and designing cookies.

“I get to be creative on the cookies,” Hughes said. “For Valentine’s Day, I could do all of the hearts I want. When it comes to the holidays, I can get some good designs and go wild on them. I like to see people’s faces when they come in and go, ‘Those are real nice!’”

Helle keeps up a family trade shaped by long nights, rebuilt recipes, expanding routes and lessons passed down from one baker to the next. From Lawson’s hand-cut donuts to wholesale bun orders across northern Illinois, the work has changed with the times, but its survival has always depended on the same thing: the people who walk through the front door.

“I always say to shop small,” Helle said. “If it wasn’t for our customers, we wouldn’t have a job and we wouldn’t be here.”

Folsom’s Bakery, 319 First Ave. in Rock Falls, is open from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday, and 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday. Find it on Facebook and TikTok or call 815-622-7870 for custom orders or for more information.