New Hampshire Community Loan Fund

Mill Village Country Store in Stoddard Keeps Their Doors Open

How do you keep your store going when the floor’s about to collapse?

Saving a Community Hub

Elisabeth (Libby) Branch is the owner of the Mill Village Country Store. Purchased in March of 2021 from its longtime proprietors, it was clearly a viable business, but what wasn’t clear was how much the building needed structurally.

During the first year, a main section of the floor threatened to collapse. It turned out that a major support beam in the basement was giving way.

The business was profitable, but needed a little help with the unexpected cost of repairing the floor. As Libby put it in an interview, “I was in desperate need of financial aid because it would have depleted the store and the doors would have been closed.”

While the business generated enough income for general repairs and upkeep, replacing a support beam is expensive. Without the infusion of a chunk of money, the only local food business in town would probably have shut down — likely forever.

Libby’s sister Annie serves as store and in-house post office manager. In the short time since they’ve taken over, the family has become deeply connected to their adopted town. From very early on, as locals came in to welcome them, they began to understand the deeper purpose their new venture served for the community.

Libby put it this way, “This is more of a community service. But we love it. And we have so many relationships that I couldn't imagine my life without and a lot of support from our customers.”

Not knowing how to finance the floor repairs, they asked around for who might be able to help them out and were directed to the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund.

Charlene Anderson, our Farm Food Lender, answered the call. And as Libby tells it, “I've been in touch with Charlene for the last two years. She was monitoring the store. Very interested in the story. We built a little bit of a friendship over this time, so she has seen the good and the bad, and, she knew that I just needed a little bit of a leg up, to get me to find a full speed ahead and she took a lot of interest and kind of took me under her wing at that time.”

Tough Winters

Libby and Annie told us, “Our foot traffic in the summer doubles, almost triples. We see that with the post office as well. People are coming into town to enjoy Highland Lake. A lot of people have summer homes on the lake, generational homes on the lake. So that brings in a lot of business for us.

And that allows us to continue running, year-round. In the winter, it can get very, very hard to keep business going. But we try and bring in new ideas. We reach out to companies such as Community Loan Fund to help. I mean, we've never run a business before. We just are trying to do what we can.

We have a lot of ideas and we have a lot of things that we want to do. It's kind of where it falls in the timeline. We hope that the weather is on our side. We have gone through two summers of historic rain and a winter of historic snowfall. We had 42 inches of snow in one storm.”

Adding Energy Efficiency

One thing that made winters difficult was energy costs combined with lower foot traffic. Libby picks up their story from here, “So the Community Loan Fund has offered a lifeline to us. We started trying to figure out the finances of the store and trying to find how to keep it viable in the winter. Kind of like tracking every dollar where all the money was going. And we really started looking into the core of the store itself, my electric, my heating, all of that. Why was everything so expensive?

So we got an energy audit done. They came out, they did a massive audit on the store. They let us know that there was a lot of things that needed to be fixed, upgraded, no weatherization. We weren't energy efficient at all. So with that said, the Community Loan Fund came in to help me, along with the USDA, trying to find ways to get some of these projects done to kind of seal the building and stop the money literally going out the window.

They offered us funding to be able to do all the upgrades that we needed that we may not have been able to do for at least ten years. That's a lot. It's also been really overwhelming. It was extremely stressful — especially because your head's just spinning with numbers and these are large numbers.

It's something that you have to do. You can't turn a blind eye on it. So that was really stressful at the time. But then knowing that there was a game plan in place helped me a lot. And then knowing that the aid was there was huge.”

High Praise

Small businesses like the Mill Village Country Store are why we do what we do. And it turns out, Libby likes us as much as we like her. “I would recommend that any small business, no matter how small you are, to reach out to the Community Loan Fund, no matter how complex your situation is — because I can tell you, mine was very complex.

I've never owned a business. I've run businesses. They were never mine. It’s a lot different. Once it’s yours, it’s a lot more emotional, and you're definitely counting every penny. So there is help. People don't know that there is. Or they'll be too afraid to ask. Or think, ‘they can't help me with this because of my situation.’ I promise, I had a lot of unique circumstances within my story — and they were able to help me.

Able to Give Back

Fixing their floor and weatherizing their building put the Mill Village Country Store in a place to give back to their community. Annie told us about one instance, “Regarding the impact of town, we've had quite a bit of that. We've realized that we didn't even know what was here. For example, when we had the 42 inches of snowfall, there was an accident on the corner over here. And one of the power poles had gone down.

So the fire station was out here all night, I think it was from 7pm. to early morning, standing out there doing signs and stuff. And, we’re friends with some of the firemen on the team and stuff, and they had messaged about dinner. So it was like 8pm. We turned on the pizza oven, started making pizzas.”

Libby and Annie shared another story how during the historic flooding, a lot of the elderly people in town got evacuated from their homes if they were close enough to the water. So they all stayed at a local school where emergency resources could be focused. The Mill Village Country Store was able to donate 10 pizzas to help feed everybody.

Fun Numbers

We support local small businesses because of the greater impact they have on communities. They are the source of jobs and often are central gathering places that provide much more than goods and services.

Businesses like the Mill Village Country Store are the heart of their communities. Investing in them brings returns that go far beyond their economic impact.

3+ Years

in business since the Mill Village Country Store changed owners

6 Jobs

employing locals in addition to the two owners and manager

250th

anniversary of the founding of Stoddard N.H. where the store is located celebrated

1900s

Time period during which the store was originally established

Meet the Sister Behind the Mill Village Country Store

We sat down with owner Elisabeth (Libby) Branch and her sister Annie Branch, who manages the store and post office. Join us in our discussion about how the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund supported their efforts to bring structural and economic stability to Stoddard’s only locally-owned, and oldest, business.

To me, it was really comforting to have somebody that could look at everything as a whole and understand it."

Elisabeth (Libby) BranchCo-owner, Mill Village Country Store

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