Vitality is returning to Hardwick’s iconic yellow barn, a large, gambrel-roof dairy that was home to the Greensboro Garage for 30 years and has been empty since 2017. The 19th-century structure on Route 15 is being renovated to hold a Cabot Creamery visitors’ center that will sell Vermont food products — including lots of cheese.
The building, which is expected to open next spring, will offer interactive exhibits about cheesemaking, displays that profile some of the cooperative’s dairy farmers and cooking demonstrations, said Erica Burke, general manager of retail operations for the Waitsfield-based cheese company. The store will stock Vermont-made wine and beer, beauty products, cutting boards, knives and other cheese-related implements, cheese from a variety of Vermont makers, and Cabot-themed swag such as clothing and bags.
“We want to showcase that we’re still trying to stay rural and agricultural.” David Upson
Located at the western entrance to Hardwick’s downtown area, the center is intended to serve as a marketing tool for Cabot Creamery products. It will help educate visitors about the region’s strong history of farming, Hardwick town manager David Upson said.
“We want to showcase that we’re still trying to stay rural and agricultural, and this is a by-product,” Upson said. “I think people are intrigued by it.”
Hardwick grew to prominence in the early 19th century as an important granite industry town. But like most of Vermont, it has long been home to several dairy farms. The town still has seven dairy farms that milk cows and a single goat dairy, according to the state Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets.
The visitors’ center is part of a $10 million project, the Yellow Barn Business Accelerator, that town officials in Hardwick have been working on since 2018.
Along with renovating the barn, which was built in 1860 and expanded in 1913, organizers plan to construct a new building next door with two primary tenants: the Hardwick-based nonprofit Center for an Agricultural Economy and Greensboro cheesemaker Jasper Hill Farm. The goal is to create a place where food businesses can grow, as well as an attraction where visitors can learn about Vermont’s agricultural products. There will also be community cold storage that local farmers can use.
“It’s this cool old barn, and it’s starting to look a little down at the heels,” said Eric Remick, chair of the Hardwick Selectboard. “It’s going to be completely renovated, and the paint’s going to be nice and bright again.”
Promoting high-end cheese and milk serves a larger goal of restoring wealth to a local dairy industry that’s been hit hard by low milk prices, Jasper Hill cofounder Mateo Kehler said. He said the company pays its farmers 30 percent more than the commodity price for milk.
“The way we think of our business is, we’re building a pipeline to places in the country and the world where there is excess concentration of capital,” Kehler said. “We put high-value products into that pipeline, and we suck cash out of places where there is plenty of it and redistribute it in our community in the way commodity markets don’t.”
Jasper Hill will use the building for storage and its cut-and-wrap cheese operations. It also plans to serve up hot meals, including raclette — a melted cheese dish that is often served with potatoes — and grilled cheese sandwiches. That could help bring in skiers, snowmobilers and cyclists using the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail, which runs past the barn.
The project isn’t just about selling cheese. The Center for an Agricultural Economy, a nonprofit that promotes Vermont’s agricultural businesses, occupies an industrial building just down the road. It’s going to move its Farm Connex program — which provides trucking service for farms and food businesses — to the new building. The Yellow Barn project will also create much-needed access to cold storage that can be used by others, said the center’s executive director, Jon Ramsay.
“It will give farm and food businesses the ability to store their products in the shoulder seasons and after the harvest, as well as store produce for the community,” said Ramsay, whose program provides locally grown vegetables to food pantries.
Town officials have long discussed ways to create more space for agricultural businesses, but they didn’t come up with a solid plan until about 2018. At the time, local craft gin maker Caledonia Spirits had given up on its search for a larger and more visible space in Hardwick and decided to build its new distillery and tasting room in Montpelier, Remick said.
“That was an impetus to say, ‘All right, we’ve got to do something here,'” Remick said. The town worked with several groups to assemble a complicated package of state and federal grants, loans, and other funding. The town was due to close on $2 million in federal tax credits at the end of May, with construction expected to start shortly thereafter.
For Cabot Creamery, the visitors’ center is a chance to tell the story behind a dairy business that now sells its tartan-labeled cheese in all 50 states. The creamery started about 15 miles south of Hardwick in the town of Cabot when 94 local farmers joined forces in 1919. It’s now owned by Massachusetts-based Agri-Mark. The dairy farmers who belong to the Cabot Creamery cooperative live in the Northeast, many of them in Vermont.
“We are really trying to open people’s eyes to the fact that we are a co-op, that we are farmer-owned,” said Burke, the company’s general manager of retail operations. “It’s a really nice message for them to take home.”
The company previously had a visitors’ center at its cheese plant in Cabot. That location drew about 30,000 people annually, but it closed during the pandemic, and there are no plans to reopen it, according to Burke.
A Cabot store in Waterbury Center, on busy Route 100, draws about 50,000 people each year. On a recent day in mud season — traditionally a time of low tourist traffic — visitors chatted with an employee who was offering cheese samples and browsed through a selection of cheese knives.
The traffic there is a far cry from the visitor numbers at the Ben & Jerry’s factory just down the road in Waterbury. The ice cream giant sees 300,000 to 350,000 visitors annually.
A popular feature at Ben & Jerry’s is the Holstein cows that graze in a pasture during the summer months. Asked if the Yellow Barn would host cows, too, Upson said it wouldn’t need to.
“There’s a working dairy farm right down the road,” he noted.
After its heyday as a granite and agricultural hub, Hardwick fell on hard times in the middle of the 19th century. Thanks in part to the draw of some strong agricultural businesses, such as Jasper Hill and Hill Farmstead Brewery in nearby Greensboro Bend, Hardwick’s fortunes have improved visibly over the past few decades as new stores, restaurants and well-heeled residents have moved in — a phenomenon detailed in local author Ben Hewitt’s 2009 book The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food.
The Northeast Kingdom town of 3,000 has been a strong supporter of efforts to complete the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail, which runs between St. Johnsbury and Swanton. The town plan focuses on encouraging diverse, agriculture-based economic growth that preserves its rural nature and environmental resources and also creates jobs for local residents.
The Yellow Barn project is designed to fit into those goals.
“It’s pretty clear people are coming for the products here,” Upson said. “The boom in tourism in Hardwick is a by-product of the fact that we really care about food and food security for our state and our area.”
Correction, June 6, 2023: A previous version of this story misidentified which program the Center for an Agricultural Economy plans to relocate to the Yellow Barn.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Cheese, Please | A Hardwick visitors’ center will feature Cabot Creamery — and the town’s ag history”
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This article appears in The Dairy Issue.
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