"It's unclear how much longer the building would have survived if it was just supported by the income from the store itself," Elmore Community Trust member Trevor Braun told VTDigger back in January 2022. That line explains more about why the Elmore Store is open today than any amount of talk about how much the town loves it.
Plenty of Vermont towns love their general store right up until the day it closes. Hinesburg's shut its doors in 2017. Monkton's followed in 2019. Jacksonville's closed the fall before Braun gave that quote. Affection was not in short supply in any of those towns. What was missing was a way to separate the building from the business, so that one bad year at the register didn't put a two-hundred-year-old structure at risk. Elmore found that way, and five years later, the results are stacked up on the store's deck most weekend mornings.
What Almost Happened in 2020
The Elmore Store has operated on the shore of Lake Elmore since the early 1800s, and for 36 years it had one set of owners. When those owners started planning retirement in 2020, the math got uncomfortable fast. The building needed real work, the kind that a single small business rarely has the capital to absorb, and a town of a little over 800 people doesn't have a deep bench of buyers waiting to take on a historic property with structural and septic issues.
So a group of Elmore residents did something more structural than a bake sale. In January 2020 they founded the Elmore Community Trust, a nonprofit built for one purpose: to own the building itself, separate from whoever ran the store inside it.
The Ownership Structure Nobody Notices
Here is the part that gets skipped in most feel-good coverage of a saved general store. The trust signed a purchase agreement in 2021 and ran a capital campaign to fund it, with guidance from Preservation Trust of Vermont, an organization that has helped at least a dozen other Vermont communities use this same model. By 2022 the trust owned the building outright.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Under the community-supported enterprise model, the trust holds the real estate and leases it to an operator at a rate that reflects what a small store can actually afford. The operator's rent goes toward maintaining the building instead of paying down a mortgage, and because the trust isn't carrying debt, it can fund big-picture repairs through grants and donations rather than hoping a good tourist season covers a new roof. It is the difference between a store that has to be profitable enough to also be its own landlord, and a store that just has to be a good store.
Preservation Trust of Vermont backed the plan with a $100,000 Bruhn Historic Revitalization Grant aimed squarely at the structural and septic problems that had been deferred for years. The overall restoration was pegged between $800,000 and $1.2 million, money that would never have come together if the trust had been trying to raise it while also servicing a purchase loan.
| Year | What Happened |
|---|---|
| 2020 | Longtime owners plan retirement after 36 years; residents form the Elmore Community Trust |
| 2021 | Trust signs a purchase agreement and runs a capital campaign |
| 2022 | Trust closes on the building and begins fundraising for restoration |
| 2025 | Tim and Becca Lindenmeyr take over as operators and start a full gut renovation |
| 2026 | Store reopens as a year-round community hub with weekly programming |
What Got Fixed, and Why It Took Five Years
Buying the building was the easy part compared to what came next. The post office inside, with its 145 P.O. boxes, was temporarily relocated to Morrisville during the transition, and the trust pushed back hard enough to keep it from becoming permanent. Then came the actual construction.
Tim Lindenmeyr, who grew up in Elmore and now runs Farm Craft VT, a seed-to-soap herb farm in Shelburne, took over as operator in 2025 along with his wife Becca and served as general contractor for the renovation himself. The building was stripped to the studs. High Ground Electric doubled the store's capacity from 200 amps to 400, the kind of upgrade that sounds unglamorous until you hear board member Jon Osborne explain the alternative.
"It was a matter of time before something would've happened with this building, probably electrical, that would've caused a fire and we would've lost the store," Osborne told WCAX.
A new septic system went in too, with an above-ground element large enough that it needed to double as usable space. The trust turned that constraint into a deck, topped with white cedar harvested within 100 miles and milled at P&R Lumber in Wolcott, plus a movable stage built by volunteer carpenters. On a community work day, more than a dozen volunteers, including nearly the entire trust board, filled a ten-cubic-yard dumpster clearing out the basement while store owner Jason Clark kept everyone fed with donated pizza. The Lindenmeyrs fronted renovation costs that ran well past $500,000, money they're still working to recoup through ongoing fundraising, including a new recurring "Rooted donor" program the trust launched to support the building long term.
The Store Today
Walk in now and the Lindenmeyrs' vision for a multiuse hub is fully operational, not aspirational. The Community Room hosts a book club on October 20, discussing Chris Bohjalian's "The Jackal's Mistress." Through the summer, Meg Newlin led yoga on the new deck every Monday and Thursday morning. On weekend evenings, the deck has hosted acts like Steep Creek Frenzy, a folk-rock trio whose members all live just down the road in Morrisville.
What's on the Elmore Store's calendar this fall:
- Weekly Community Room programming, including book club discussions
- Live music on the rebuilt deck, drawing on local acts based in Lamoille County
- The post office's 145 P.O. boxes, back in the building after their temporary relocation
- A grocery counter alongside handmade local goods, same as it's operated for two centuries
None of that happens if the trust hadn't separated the real estate from the risk back in 2021. Community affection kept the idea alive. Ownership structure is what actually kept the doors open.
Two Other Things Worth Knowing Right Now
If you're heading up Elmore Mountain this month, plan around the fire tower closure. The tower itself is closed from September 14 through October 30 for safety improvements, and the short spur trail up to it will be closed the whole time, though the Fire Tower Trail and Ridgeline Trail stay open for most of that window. The trailhead parking area closes entirely on September 29 and 30 while crews stage materials for a helicopter lift to the summit, so campers can still reach the trails those two days but won't be able to park a vehicle there.
If you'd rather run than hike, the Elmore Mountain 10k takes place October 3 on trails inside Elmore State Park, with registration open through the day before the race.
Between a rebuilt store that finally matches what people have always called it and a mountain getting maintenance work, Elmore is having the kind of fall where the infrastructure is finally catching up to the affection people have had for this town all along.
If you're keeping an eye on what makes towns like Elmore work, from the store on the corner to the trail up the mountain, that's exactly the kind of local detail Grant Wieler pays attention to every day. Reach out anytime to talk about what's happening around Lamoille County, or if you're ready, start your Stowe search today.
