East Montpelier sugar house adds post-and-beam ‘dream’
The economy may be sour but business remains sweet at the Bragg Farm Sugar House in East Montpelier, whose gift shop and mail order business is thriving despite the current downturn.
There’s a big, clear sign that Bragg’s is doing well, rising next door to the gift shop in the shape of a spectacular post-and-beam carriage house-style barn. The structure, which will cost around $150,000 when finished, has been a dream for Doug Bragg for several years.
“I’ve been driving all over the state looking at barns for three or four years,” says Bragg, but the cost always was daunting until the interest rates got down to around 6 percent last spring. The Braggs jumped and committed to build it, working with a local loan partner, the Northfield Savings Bank.
The Braggs say the two-story barn will serve a number of functions. First, it will provide much needed storage space for items in their catalog and mail order sales. Second, it will have an area where visitors can sit and look out at the views on their hillside spot on Route 14 north of East Montpelier village, or where fall pumpkins will be on display and the Braggs can do sugar on snow events. And it also will complement the traditional Vermont theme that underlies the Braggs’ business, providing an aesthetically pleasing edifice.
“There’s so many barns going down, we decided we’d like to put one up,” quips Barbara Bragg.
Doug Bragg, a seventh-generation Vermonter whose farm roots go back to the late 1700s when his ancestors began farming in Warren and Fayston, says the barn was designed as an eye-catching complement to the business they began at the shop they built 17 years ago.
“We’re pretty picky about landscape here,” he says, saying they wanted to keep with Vermont tradition.
“Everything we do around here is based on that,” he explains, noting they still sugar using old-fashioned buckets.
