Local resident Corrie Van Ausdal, right, and her family — Matthew Collins, left, and Tiger and Theo Collins — became the new owners of beloved local ice cream spot Corner Cone in April. Van Ausdal spoke with the News recently about her first summer as a purveyor of frozen treats, and what’s coming down the pike for the business. (Submitted photo by Matthew Collins)
A new chapter at Corner Cone
- Published: September 20, 2026
Corner Cone, located at the corner of Walnut and Dayton streets, is a place near and dear to many Yellow Springers’ hearts. Talk to any townie, and chances are they remember eating soft-serve ice cream in the August sun, listening to live music or shopping at the nearby farmers market.
Recently, though, the building has changed hands: Corner Cone reopened April 1 under the ownership of local entrepreneur Corrie Van Ausdal.
The location has had a long and storied history and has changed ownership several times throughout the decades. Although Van Ausdal is new to the job, she said she’s made it her mission to carry on the business’s legacy as a fixture of the community.
The building that would eventually become Corner Cone was built in 1955 by Russell Bales and was long owned by the Bales/Heaton family. It operated as a franchise of Tastee Freez — at the time an iconic chain of ice cream parlors, outside which young couples in the heartland could often be found suckin’ on chili dogs, at least if you ask John Mellencamp. The company later filed for bankruptcy and shut down many of its locations, and the Yellow Springs franchise later operated independently as the Freeze Dairy Bar until 2006, when it was sold to local resident Bob Swaney.
Swaney’s Corner Cone is the one that many young adults who grew up in or visited Yellow Springs remember. No small number of Yellow Springers have memories of rolling up downtown after school on their bikes, ready to spend their allowance money on a cone of the good stuff.
“He’s the person who made the patio really nice,” Van Ausdal told the News. “He planted all those vines, and he built that deck. He put up that stage, and they played live music there. I think Bob did a lot to make it a place of cultural importance.”
Swaney’s tenure was also when Corner Cone’s iconic mural was painted by local artist Pierre Nagley. Swaney also hosted live music, art installations, ukulele lessons and theater performances — including one of the village’s first 10-Minute Play Festivals in 2010 — on the restaurant’s patio.
In 2019, Swaney sold the business to Fairborn resident Lawren Williams, who had also operated Williams Eatery in the village from 2008 to 2018. In 2021, ownership changed hands again to local resident Matthew Kirk, who reopened Corner Cone that July with a simplified menu. He sold the business to Van Ausdal five years later.
“I heard Corner Cone was for sale. It was sort of a quiet, off-market situation,” Van Ausdal recounted. “That was January. We got the keys March 1. We started scrubbing, and getting to know the place, with the intention of an April 1 open.”
Van Ausdal walked the News through some of the trial and error that went into getting Corner Cone ready for its spring reopening. Although Van Ausdal had previous experience managing businesses, she said she and her family — husband Matthew and kids Tiger and Theo — discovered new challenges in running a restaurant.
“When we moved in, there was a lot of stuff there. Some of it, we understood what it was, and some we didn’t,” she said. “It would be like, a weird metal thing in a funny shape, and we used a lot of Google image search to find what it might have been used for, and whether it might be useful to us.”
Despite similar challenges in finding suppliers and building routines, Van Ausdal and her family were nevertheless ready to open by April 1. Van Ausdal described the process as “solving solvable problems.”
“The hope is that the funnel gets smaller,” she said. “You have a lot of big problems in the beginning, and then you’re solving, solving, solving, and then you have fewer problems to solve — which is part of the fun of owning a business.”
Van Ausdal also owns Black Cap Electric, a utility service provider. She founded the business in 2016 after working as a contractor. Part of her managerial style, she said, involves hiring young Yellow Springers to help them acquire the professional skills and connections necessary to build a career. This principle has carried over to Corner Cone, where Van Ausdal often hires teenagers with the intent of familiarizing them with the culinary industry.
“For a lot of them it’s their first job ever, and for others it’s their first job in a restaurant,” Van Ausdal explained. “They’re not going to be here for 50 years and get a pension and a gold watch, obviously, but at their next job I want somebody to say ‘Oh good, they’re trained. They know how to show up on time, they know how to clean, they know how to present themselves, how to talk to customers, how to handle cash.’ I want them to be able to go to their next position, and for someone to say, ‘Cool. This I can work with.’”
Van Ausdal said she hopes to expand Corner Cone into new territory in the future. She said she is considering a special hot-food menu for the winter, along with complimentary curbside pickup. She also hopes to introduce a winter market during the holiday season.
“For the locals, I want the opportunity to surprise you — that every time you show up, there’s something you’ve never seen before, or never tried before; that you have the option to try something completely new,” Van Ausdal said.
*Jonas Bahn is a freelance reporter for the News.
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