This story by Christina Dolan was first published in The Valley News on Oct. 30.
SOUTH STRAFFORD — When Melvin and Sue Coburn announced in the summer of 2022 that they planned to retire and sell their general store after nearly 50 years of operation, many Strafford residents feared the town would lose not just its grocery store, but an important community hub.
Coburns’ General Store, located on Route 132 in South Strafford, sells groceries, fresh meats, gas and hardware, and also houses a laundromat, a bank and a branch of the U.S. Postal Service. Melvin Coburn and his brother Philip purchased the store in 1977.
The nearest grocery alternatives for Strafford residents are between 25 and 40 minutes away in Royalton, West Lebanon or Hanover.
Strafford would be a “food desert” without the store, said resident Trudi Brock, the board president of the nonprofit Strafford Community Trust.
A plan to save the store is now in the works. On Oct. 16, the all-volunteer community trust formalized an option agreement with the Coburns for the potential purchase of the building and the business.
The trust, which was incorporated by the state in January, has six months to raise the nearly $2 million needed to buy and renovate the building, and to hire a proprietor to run the business.
The trust grew out of earlier, informal discussions among residents about the future of the store.
When Brock reached out to the Preservation Trust of Vermont in 2022 with concerns about Strafford losing its store, she learned about the “community supported enterprise” model of business ownership, where a nonprofit entity raises funds to purchase the building and then leases it to a proprietor at below-market rent.
The arrangement “lowers the bar for an operator” who might be interested in running a country store, Brock said, eliminating a mortgage and overhead costs.
The community trust then serves as a kind of steward of the general store.
“The model is a work-around,” Preservation Trust of Vermont President Ben Doyle said by phone. “The truth is that in rural communities there’s no other way to get a general store to be viable.”
The community supported model has been an effective mechanism for preserving general stores in many Vermont towns, including Barnard, Putney, Craftsbury and Albany, Doyle said.
Other towns, including South Woodstock, Pomfret and Brownsville, have seen their stores remain viable through the interventions of wealthy backers rather than nonprofit trusts.
General stores are important “third places” in the lives of rural Vermonters, Doyle said. Outside of home and work, they are where you meet people with whom you might have little in common other than a love of the store.
When general stores close, “it’s really devastating for a lot of communities,” Doyle said.
With the fundraising portion of the Coburns project now public, so is the process of finding someone who wants to operate a general store in South Strafford.
The trust is looking for a proprietor with a “passion for the collaborative, community-centered nature of the project,” according to its call for proposals.
Sue Coburn said she worries about a new operator having the same commitment to the community that has made the store such an important center of life in town. Because it supports local fundraising efforts, Coburns’ hosts raffles, pie sales and other fundraisers along with selling local products.
“That’s what I’m afraid we may lose,” Coburn said Monday.
The idea, on the part of the Coburns and the trust, is to transition ownership of the store so smoothly that business is never interrupted.
“We’re hoping it will fall into place comfortably,” Sue said.
The Strafford Community Trust plans to hold a public forum on Sunday, Nov. 17 to formally launch the fundraising effort and answer questions about the project. The forum’s location and time have yet to be announced. Details about project may be found at: straffordcommunitytrust.org.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Community members hatch plan to save Coburns’.