EAST BERKSHIRE — Heidi LeVell fell in love with the place the moment she walked in.
That was years ago, when the shuttered 1870s general store was coated in dust and cluttered with old goods. She loved it so much, in fact, that she went on to buy it — and in the process, brought her family from California to the big yellow house next door.
In November, LeVell opened Barn Owl Bistro and Goods here, along Route 118 in East Berkshire, after spending more than a year gutting and renovating the property.
Today the store’s inventory runs a gamut of coffee drinks and pastries, a wall of candy jars and local fudge, and gifts sourced from Vermont and across the country. There are tables and booths throughout the place, and a loft up the stairs in back.
LeVell wanted the store to mix old and new. In some ways, “we’re very old-timey,” she said, referring to details like the original store sign, which is mounted above the front counter, or the building’s original, exposed wiring, which runs along the ceiling.
But a more important goal, she said, was to build a resource for local residents. Besides a Jolley convenience store, there are few places in town to buy food and drinks. It’s also one of the only places around town to meet friends without having to pay for a meal.
One role that Barn Owl has come to play in this town of 1,500 is a place for locals to do remote work. About a dozen regulars work from the store each week, LeVell said, taking advantage of its free, high-speed Wi-Fi in a town where many homes just don’t have it.
The vast majority of roads in Berkshire do not have fiber optic or cable networks running along them, according to 2021 state Department of Public Service data. Many residents’ internet access does not meet the federal government’s minimum standard for broadband, which is 25 megabit-per-second downloads and 3 mbps uploads.
“It’s a big problem,” LeVell said, speaking about remote work options. “Most people here have to drive over to St. Albans (about a half-hour away) if they want to do that.”
Among Barn Owl’s regular remote workers is Mak Maedean, a pharmacy manager who lives in East Berkshire and was using their laptop at a table near the front window.
The 19-year-old said they work from the store once or twice a week, and are sometimes joined by their partner, who’s a student. It can be difficult to find reliable, free internet in the Berkshire area, Maedean said, so Barn Owl has been a welcome resource.
“They’ve always talked about making places where kids could just go hang out, go do work, go do school stuff,” Maedean said. “But we’ve never had that around here until this place opened up.”
Building access
In Montgomery, the next town over south of Jay Peak, a local nonprofit organization is in the early stages of building a workspace for the surrounding community, too.
The Montgomery Community Project plans to retrofit the basement of the town’s Center for the Arts, which is housed in an old church at the top of Main Street, into a coworking space. The facility could include large desks and insulated phone booths, said Daniel Khan, who’s been working on the project, and also would have high-speed internet.
Montgomery, like Berkshire, is poorly served when it comes to broadband, according to the state’s data. Many households clock in below the minimum broadband speed.
Khan, who operates a hotel and wedding venue in town, said he knows multiple people who manage online businesses from home there and need more reliable internet. Some of those are side gigs, he said, such as selling artwork on the website Etsy.
Another local helping develop the coworking space, Sarah Borodaeff, works remotely as a project manager. She sometimes has to leave home and sit outside one of the town’s Wi-Fi hotspots, she said, to accomplish work tasks that need more internet bandwidth.
“I’m sitting in my car to take a Zoom meeting because the connection is not strong enough at home,” Borodaeff said. “It’s not sustainable.”
In the fall of 2020, Northwest Fiberworx, the communications union district that mainly serves Franklin and Grand Isle counties, installed 19 Wi-Fi hotspots at sites across the region, according to Sean Kio, the organization’s executive director.
Kio said these hotspots are not always at locations where people can sit down with a laptop, but still can provide a good connection in a pinch. For instance, one of the hotspots in Enosburg, where he lives, is at the town’s public library, while another is at Maplefields, the convenience store.
Northwest Fiberworx’s main charge, though, is bringing broadband directly into people’s homes. The most common question that comes in Kio’s inbox from local residents, he said, is: “I work from home. How do I get better internet?”
The communications union district includes about 29,000 homes and businesses, more than a quarter of which, or roughly 7,900, don’t meet the federal broadband standard. About 2,500 homes and businesses in the district, or 9%, have no connectivity at all.
Kio said eastern Franklin County, including towns such as Montgomery, Enosburg and Bakersfield, has the highest concentration of addresses lacking broadband access.
Last week, Northwest Fiberworx announced plans to partner with Lamoille FiberNet, the communications union district (CUD) serving that county, to build an open-access broadband network that would reach 42,000 homes and businesses in the region.
Open access networks can host multiple internet service providers, creating competition and ultimately spurring companies to provide better, more affordable service, according to an October 2021 report commissioned by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“By joining forces, the CUDs represent a larger population which improves economic efficiencies working with broadband consultants, service providers and network operations vendors,” Val Davis, the executive director of Lamoille FiberNet, said in a statement.
Kio said the two communications union districts are nearing an agreement with Google Fiber to make it the network’s first provider. Google Fiber currently operates in more than a dozen cities around the country, ranging from Atlanta, Georgia to Provo, Utah.
Specific details of the agreement still are under negotiation, Kio said.
Per Northwest Fiberworx, the project would be supported by a combination of private funding, and state and federal grants.
Community spaces
Borodaeff said another benefit of the planned coworking space in Montgomery, beyond serving as a resource for individual workers, is that it could be a meeting place for groups of employees — or other community organizations from the local area.
Vermont has other coworking spaces, she noted, but none are close by. There’s one in Newport, about a 40-minute drive, and another in Stowe, about 45 minutes away.
“There’s a pretty large circle that we can serve with this,” Borodaeff said. “We’re in eastern Franklin County, but we’re also the gateway to the NEK.”
And close to home, the dozen or so regulars at Barn Owl Bistro and Goods could soon be looking to work elsewhere. LeVell named the place “bistro” for a reason — the store has a commercial kitchen, and pending a state permit, it will begin serving more food.
At that point Barn Owl may not provide as good an environment for quiet work, she said, so she was happy to learn about the proposed space in Montgomery.
For Patty Lambert, who took a seat on the couch near the front of the store after playing a game of Scrabble, visiting the store has become an important way to meet others.
The South Richford resident, who is retired, recalled the time she tried to start a weekly game night at a local library, only to have four people come, one time.
With LeVell’s blessing, Lambert decided to try hosting it at Barn Owl — a place that she already comes to shop for gifts and take a break from bicycle rides on the Missisquoi Valley Rail Trail, which runs through town about a quarter-mile from the store.
Now, game nights have become a Friday fixture at the store. In recent weeks, LeVell said, some 25 people have come to play.
