STRAFFORD — Phoebe Mix had a simple plan to market-research her idea about opening a breakfast and lunch cafe in a building she owns by the Strafford Green.
Mix, who lives above the U.S. Post Office at the intersection of Brook Road and Justin Morrill Memorial Highway, hauled a couple of folding chairs from her deck around back and set them up in the parking lot on a September afternoon, where she sat with a friend — sans coffee — to observe the scene.
Mix was contemplating opening a cafe in the white clapboard annex of the 19th-century red brick building and wanted to see the flow of people and traffic at the south point of the Strafford green. Although the village has no other businesses to attract travelers, the retired IRS tax attorney said her “little experiment” yielded positive results.
“In the space of two hours we saw people we knew, people we didn’t, people we hadn’t seen in a while, a newcomer to town, tourists,” Mix reported.
The conclusion of her market study: “People are desperate to get out,” she said.
Mix is now in the process of assembling the necessary permits — water, sewer, commercial kitchen — to open the cafe, which will occupy the annex that was once the offices of the Strafford Historical Society, in the first half of the year.
“There’s a lot of interest from people in town for something like this,” Mix said of her planned cafe, which doesn’t yet have a name but which she said would be open from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. The origin of the idea, like the ideas behind many businesses, germinated in a personal desire, Mix explained.
“I wanted a place to get a latte and not have to leave Strafford to get one,” Mix said, noting that doing so currently requires a drive to South Royalton, Norwich, Woodstock, Hanover or White River Junction.
(Coburns’ General Store in South Strafford serves a cappuccino but, alas, no latte.)
Her plan for a cafe, however, required the historical society to find a new home. But in what might be ascribed to coffee kismet, the Masonic Lodge building in the village of South Strafford, which has been the location of a series of cafes that have come and gone over the years, will become the new home of the historical society, which currently has a contract to buy it from the Masons for $1.
“It’s not every day somebody offers you a building for a dollar,” said Steve Willbanks, president of the society. “For us, it came as a complete surprise that something like this would be offered us.”
Willbanks, a former Selectboard chairman, said Mix told the society in August that she had “other plans” for the post office annex known as “the wing” to the “Brick Store,” so named because it had once been a general store when built in 1835.
Melvin Coburn, treasurer of the Masons and owner of Coburns’ General Store, said the Masons building in the village has increasingly become a financial burden during the pandemic as they have not found steady tenants and have to hold biweekly fundraising breakfasts to cover the costs of taxes, heating fuel and maintenance.
“We’ve had three to four different people try to run a cafe there, and they have all been unsuccessful. It’s a great location, but just everybody who tried it didn’t get the clientele to make a go of it, unfortunately,” he said.
The most recent cafe to operate out of the location was Hattie’s Kitchen, which had a brief, nine-month run from September 2016 to May 2017 before it closed. From 2012 to 2016, the cafe was known as Cafe 232.
As part of the arrangement in selling the building, the Masons — now down to about 28 members — can continue to hold their monthly meetings on the second floor and share storage space on the third floor.
Built around 1900, the Masons building “is a great gift but comes with some challenges,” said Willbanks, who predicted it will require “quite a bit of renovation.”
Willbanks said the Society is consulting with noted architect Greg Colling, who specializes in historic New England structures, and Sharon woodworker Rocky Fuller, who oversaw the restoration of the spire on Strafford’s Town House a couple years ago.
As for the cost of renovation, Willbanks said he has “no clue” but expects it will be funded through a combination of grants, tax credits and fundraising.
“Right now I just want to get to the closing and worry about that afterward,” he said.
The society will occupy the first floor of the Masons building, which at 1,200 square feet is about the same amount of space that the society had at its place in Mix’s building, plenty of room for offices, records and display cases for artifacts from the society’s collection. Those artifacts include silk gowns worn by the women in the town’s leading families, miners’ helmets and an 8-inch-diameter cast-iron ladle used for molten copper at the former Elizabeth Mine in South Strafford, a Superfund site that now houses a solar array farm.
In the meantime, the society’s property is in a storage container in South Strafford.
Mix said the idea for her cafe has been “in the back of my mind” since her mother and the property’s former owner, Kendall Mix, died in 2014.
“But COVID-19 counterintuitively made it seem that now is the time to do it,” Mix said. “The building sits on the green and has space for parking and outdoor seating in front where people can gather,” so if the pandemic continues into spring and summer there will be room for socially distanced seating.
A place a few steps away from her home where she could grab a coffee and a light bite sounded good to Lianne Thomashow, who lives on Brook Road a couple doors away from the post office.
“I think this will bring a little activity to the upper village,” Thomashow said, referring to how residents distinguish Strafford from South Strafford. “A lot of people really miss the South Strafford cafe reiterations … everything is 30 minutes away, so this would be great.”
“I just hope people will support it. That’s always been the problem,” Thomashow said.
Despite the difficulty with the turnover of cafes in South Strafford, Mix said she thinks there should be enough support for her cafe 2.6 miles to the north, although she acknowledged it is a little farther afield.
“I’m in a much more challenging place,” she said. But “I do believe Strafford needs this.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
