To call Albany Selectboard chair Chris Jacobs excited is an understatement.
After nearly $800,000 in fundraising, construction began this fall to rebuild the Albany General Store, which served this Orleans County town of about 1,000 people before fire destroyed it in 2013.
“To actually see — instead of paperwork of various sorts — woodwork is fantastic,” said Jacobs, who has collaborated with a group of volunteers for the last three years on the project.
The revamped store is slated to be finished in December, with a tentative springtime opening. When the ribbon’s cut, a central part of this community will finally be restored.
“It’s where you can stop by and get your lunch or a bowl of soup or a cup of coffee and see your neighbors,” said Hannah Pearce, president of the Albany Community Trust, the nonprofit group behind the effort. “It’s a place of commerce, where you can pay into your community directly, and I think we’ve really missed that.”
The planning began in late 2017, when the people behind the eventual nonprofit first met and discussed the idea. The store’s owners weren’t able to reopen after the fire, but townspeople wanted to see it return.
So the volunteers bought the store in 2018 and began raising money, even before receiving federal nonprofit status in early 2019.
Pearce said the group has raised close to $360,000 from individuals and events and about $425,000 from grants, foundation gifts and tax credits.
“For us, to be able to raise this kind of money in our community has been really incredible,” she said, considering the small town isn’t particularly wealthy.
That’s one indicator of how much residents were invested in the project. As Jacobs put it, “You wouldn’t raise that money if it wasn’t something somebody wanted.”
The selectboard chair said there are two other stores in the area — one about 6 miles north, one about 6 miles south — “which isn’t huge.”
“But it’s still just the impact of having it there and being part of the town,” he said.
In a way, the rebuilt store will complete the downtown landscape: Albany has a new clerk’s office and a new fire station, which is across the street from the under-construction store.
Community groups are responding
General and country stores — iconic pieces of many small towns in Vermont — have been disappearing statewide over the last decade.
“It’s incredibly difficult to run a store in a small community these days,” said Erin Sigrist, president of the Vermont Retail and Grocers Association.
These shops are often owned generationally by families, and when their owners retire, there usually “isn’t a single person or a family that wants to take over that type of a business in every town,” Sigrist said.
That’s a problem because, she said, in some communities, general stores are the only places for food and staple goods for miles, and they might also be the only places that accept food stamps.
She’s seen several groups like the one in Albany form to keep these stores afloat.
“Vermonters are really seeing the value and wanting to make sure that they sustain that hub in their community,” Sigrist said.
Pearce, the Albany Community Trust president, listed similar efforts in Peacham, Putney, Guilford and Calais.
The Vermont Retail and Grocers Association also runs the Vermont Alliance of Independent Country Stores, and Sigrist said the group has been looking to draw attention to the small outlets through feature articles on its website.
“This is really the start of a larger effort to support those country stores,” Sigrist said.
Take a recent proclamation by Gov. Phil Scott, which declared this October “Independent Country Store Month.”
The Albany group hopes to raise a final $100,000 this fall and winter to open the store.
Pearce said it’ll be operated by the three behind the Craftsbury General Store — Kit Basom, Emily Maclure and Jana Smart — and offer a classic lineup of general store offerings: groceries, deli food, coffee, beer.
The revitalized store will also feature a new community room with extra seating that may eventually host community events, she said.
“So when you run into your neighbor who you haven’t seen in a couple weeks and want to say, ‘Oh, let’s have a cup of coffee and sit down,’ this will be a place to do that,” said Jacobs, the selectboard chair.
