Co-ops help keep
rural towns alive
By Annie Baxter
Editor’s note: the article originally was
broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio.
he little farming communities
of Vesta and Echo
in southwestern
Minnesota know the
plight of small towns
first hand. As local farms shut down
over the years, so did many businesses.
The townspeople tolerated the loss of
the pool hall or the gas station. But
when the café closed its doors down in
Vesta, that’s where people had to draw
the line.
In Echo, the loss of the little grocery
store was the last straw. So the
townspeople took matters into their
own hands and have established new
businesses through cooperatives they
formed.
The Vesta café is a perfect postcard
picture: country knickknacks, like
teacups and tiny plastic apples, decorate
the walls, and the smell of strong
coffee fills the air. At three in the afternoon,
business is brisk. A group of
retired farmers plays a cut throat game
of cards in the corner.
“Sometimes they almost kill each
other just for a quarter,” one farmer
jokes.
A few feet away sit three Vesta
ladies, exchanging gossip over slices of
lemon meringue pie. They say they’re
here at least once a day.
“I think it was three times today for
me,” one woman admits.
For decades, a café next door was
the local hangout. It closed nearly
three years ago. The cafe seemed to
have plenty of customers, so locals
guess it wasn’t well-managed.
Carole Jordan works at the new café
and she waitressed at the old one, too.
She says when it closed, she lost more
than just a job.
“The town died without a café,”
Jordan says matter-of-factly. “There
were no cars on the street. I said pretty
soon the tumbleweeds will be blowing
down the street.”
Once the café closed, that brought
the number of empty storefronts to
four — half the businesses on the
street. The farmers who play cards had
nowhere to go. Sometimes, they’d
resort to setting up a card table in the
liquor store.
Finally, people in town took action.
They pooled their resources together
to build this cafe. Dan Holmberg has
lived in the area all his life. He was one
of the organizers.
“A lot of people got their heads
together and decided maybe we can
build this thing if we get donations. So
we asked for donations from the community,
and I think we put about
$90,000 together. It was all volunteer
labor, except for the electrical. I think
it took about eight months to build the
place, but I think we did a good job,”
Holmberg says.
The community founded a nonprofit
organization to pay for the café.
Then they interviewed potential managers
and decided to lease the business
to Yvonne Ellis. She and her husband
run the operation now.
If it weren’t for this cafe, Vesta residents
would have to drive about 20
miles to Redwood Falls or Marshall
for a restaurant. But it’s not the commute
that really bothers people. The
town needs a café for reasons that go
beyond convenience, according to the
local bank’s loan officer, David
Widman.
“If we don’t have this, we’re not
gonna have a community,” Widman
asserts. “This is what’s facing small
towns throughout the Midwest.”
Vesta has a lot in common with its
neighbor Echo, just five miles up the
road. The town’s about a mile wide
and a mile long, with a crush of abandoned
buildings at the center.
Echo residents Nancy Harvey,
Corlys Chase and Guila Kurtz point to
the town’s landmarks, or what remains
of them.
“The grocery store just closed in
December,” Kurtz notes.
“And didn’t that used to be a
hotel?” Harvey asks. “There’s nothing
in there now, I believe.”
“The pool hall had been there for
years and years and years. But it’s been
vacant for a long time. Someone lived
on the second floor,” Chase says, shaking
her head.
“So you see, there are vacant buildings
everywhere. And that’s what we
don’t want,” Harvey concludes.
These three women are shaking
things up in town. When the grocery
store closed last year, they were
spurred to do something about it.
They’re part of a group of mostly
retirement-age women who raised
enough money to build the town a new
store.
It turns out they’re familiar with the
do-it-yourself approach. A few years
ago, the public school closed down,
and people in town got together to
open a charter school. Since then,
attendance has more than tripled.
Guila Kurtz says people in Echo
learned a lesson from the school, and
they’re applying it to the grocery store.
“No one is going to do it for us. We
decided to take over!” Kurtz says with
a smile.
More and more rural towns are
coming to the same conclusion. In fact,
Minnesota has more than 1,000 coops.
It’s one of the leading states
embracing the cooperative business
model.
The store in Echo will be nonprofit
and small-scale. They’ll keep a limited
inventory of items like milk, cereal,
and coffee. And it will bear the apt
name of Hope Market.
“One thing that’s happened since we
started this grocery store, is that there
have been people who are interested in
starting other businesses in town,”
Nancy Harvey says. “That’s gonna
bring in other income, it’s gonna be
good for the city — to help the town
start thriving again.” So far, no other
new businesses have opened up. And at
this point, Hope Market is still an
empty lot marked off by some plastic
orange fencing. But construction is
supposed to move fast, and the market
should open this fall.
