Community Buzz

Amos Ives Root helped with beekeeping as a young boy on his Medina family farm. But it wasn’t until the 1860s, when he owned a jewelry store on the Medina square, that he really dove into it.

“A bunch of bees landed on their window,” says Brad Root, the fifth-generation president of A.I. Root Co. “He still had this jewelry business, but he was beginning to focus on beekeeping.”

The company evolved, publishing an educational magazine about beekeeping, manufacturing beekeeping equipment, selling harvested honey and then selling beeswax religious candles to churches, eventually becoming the largest U.S. direct supplier to Catholic churches.

Now Root Candles, it offers spiritual candles, dinner candles, fragrance candles and more made with an all-natural blend of beeswax, hydrogenated soybean oil, palm wax and vegetable oil. It has facilities in Texas and Iowa and a flagship Medina store, with over 25 color and 70 fragrance options. Root says Medina’s Victorian architecture and atmosphere were “too near and dear” to them to leave.

Root explains why Root Candles has thrived in Medina and throughout the country.

“It’s really the whole thing of eliciting memories of your life … from the burning of devotional lights in the church to the use of dinner candles on a tablescape.

We’re unique in the candle industry that we produce many of our own wicks.

There are a lot of generational families here. They certainly express their appreciation for what our business and our family has been to the community. They’ve either worked here or an ancestor worked here, or they just love the smell of the company.

[Medina is] definitely a growing community through many decades that keeps growing further out.

It’s trying to keep that connection to what we had on that central town square.

It’s nice to see. … You want to hang on to those little bits of charm.”

— as told to Alexandra Sobczak