ELMORE, Vt. (WCAX) – The tiny town of Elmore is once again stepping up to help save its beloved community hub. The community came together three years ago to save the store, now it’s time for some badly needed repairs.
The Elmore Store has been a staple in town since it was built in the early 1800s, and to this day it remains the only store in town.
“When I come to the Elmore Store, I get to visiting, and a lot of times I forget why I even came because now I’ve been here 20 minutes and someone else comes in and you get to talking to them. So, it’s always been a really good place to talk to your neighbors and interact with them,” said local resident Nancy Allen.
“It’s the core of our community,” said Jon Osborne, a board member of the Elmore Community Trust, which formed a few years ago and raised the money to buy the building in 2022. They also pushed to keep the post office — with its 145 P.O. boxes — from being relocated.
Now, the focus is on preserving the memories made inside. Tim Lindenmeyr and his wife are taking over as the store’s new operators. The first order of business is giving the store a makeover. “The building is old, it’s almost 200 years old, if not older. There’s a little bit of work to it. We’re not going to try to straighten it out and polish it and make it a brand new building, we’re going to stabilize it. Our interior decor is hoping to go back to the 1910 to 1920 kind of feel,” Lindenmeyr said.
“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 said.
With these much-needed upgrades, the core of this community can continue and broaden its impact. “It’s always been more than just a general store. It’s always had the post office, it’s always been a community hub, but we’re trying to make use of the downstairs space and the upstairs space and share that with the community a little bit more,” Lindenmeyr said.
The goal is to have the store fixed up and back open by Memorial Day weekend, just in time to welcome in the summer crowds. “We need to get this store open to generate revenue, so there’s a lot of pressure to capture as much of the summer season as possible,” Osborne said.
And those iconic P.O. boxes won’t be going away. “It’s going to be getting a bit of a spa treatment and get dinged up a little bit. Not make it brand new or anything, but just kind of give it a little TLC,” Lindenmeyr said.
So that this community centerpiece. can live on for generations to come. “With the store being closed, it changes the whole feeling of the town. It makes the town feel lonely. I don’t really care for it,” Allen said.
There will be a fundraising campaign to help preserve this piece of history.