In April, a room at Grantham Village School filled with residents who had one question ready before the meeting even started. The town's Master Plan Committee had built the entire second workshop around it. The announcement, sent out ahead of time, put it plainly: this session was for any residents who have ever asked "why don't we have a coffee shop in town?" or "how do we get a pharmacy nearby?" That's not a rhetorical flourish. It's the actual framing the town used to get people in the door.
As the Valley News reported, three people sat on the panel that night: Bruce Bergeron, who runs Jake's Market and Deli, the store most locals still call by its old name, Rum Brook. Drew Edmunds of Northwind Security, the town's largest commercial landowner. And Steve Schneider, general manager of the Eastman Community Association. If you wanted to know why Grantham looks the way it does commercially, those were the three people in the room who actually knew.
The Coffee Shop Question Was Never Really About Coffee
Grantham hadn't touched its Master Plan since 2017. Nine years is a long time for a town to run on assumptions about what its residents want, especially when the underlying population has been quietly shifting the whole time. The survey that fed into this year's update found the same thing residents have been saying at the counter of Rum Brook for years: they want a pharmacy, a real grocery option, and yes, a coffee shop, while keeping the town's rural character intact. That last part matters. This wasn't a push for a strip mall. It was a request for a handful of specific, small-scale businesses that don't currently exist inside town lines.
The Valley News quoted Selectboard member Jeremy Walla, who also sits on the Master Plan Committee, saying:
"Discussions are where the real ideas come out."
That's a low-key way of saying the town doesn't actually know yet whether a coffee shop is coming. What it knows is that the people who'd have to build one were finally sitting across the table from the people asking for it.
Eastman's Changing Role in Grantham
Here's the fact that reframes the whole conversation. Roughly two-thirds of Grantham's population, out of about 3,400 residents, lives inside Eastman, the private four-season community that spans 3,600 acres across Grantham, Enfield, and Springfield. Eastman counts 1,440 occupied properties. Residents there pay Eastman's own fees for road maintenance, capital projects, and staff on top of their regular municipal property taxes, and in exchange they get a lake, six beaches, a golf course, a fitness center, and miles of cross-country trails whose access is generally reserved for Eastman residents.
For most of Eastman's history, that arrangement made sense because it was largely a seasonal community. People came up for summer, or for ski weekends, and went home. But Schneider told Valley News something that changes the math on why "no coffee shop" suddenly feels like an unresolved problem instead of a permanent fact of small-town life: Eastman runs its own resident survey every five years, and the share of people living there full time has moved from about 60 percent in 2021 to closer to 65 percent now. That's a modest shift in percentage terms, but it means a meaningful chunk of Grantham's population that used to leave every fall now doesn't. A town's commercial footprint built for weekend visitors starts to feel thin once a majority of the people it serves are living there in February, not just July.
What One Family-Run Store Already Solves, and What It Can't
Ask why nobody has opened a standalone coffee shop in Grantham and the honest answer starts at Rum Brook. Jake's Market and Deli, at 249 Route 10, is open early, from 5:30 in the morning, and it already does a lot of the job a small commercial district would otherwise split among several businesses. It brews Green Mountain Coffee alongside a full deli counter, sells wine and beer, stocks a meat department, and keeps gas pumps running out front for the steady stream of cars getting off I-89 at Exit 13. For a lot of Grantham and Eastman residents, it's the default stop for a forgotten grocery item, a sandwich, or a tank of gas, all in one visit.
That's useful, but it doesn't answer whether a dedicated coffee shop could thrive. A store that already offers coffee, groceries, deli, and fuel gives residents a one-stop option. The gap Grantham's survey respondents are pointing at isn't an absence of caffeine. It's an absence of a place to sit down, meet a neighbor, and stay a while, which a gas station counter was never built to provide.
What Residents Actually Asked For, Measured Against What's Already Nearby
The survey wasn't just about coffee. Residents also flagged interest in a pharmacy, a full grocery store, and a community center with amenities like courts, a pool, and parks. Laid next to what already exists a short drive away, the pattern gets clearer:
| What residents want | Nearest existing option today |
|---|---|
| Coffee shop, sit-down | None in Grantham; Rum Brook serves coffee to go |
| Pharmacy | Colonial Pharmacy or Rite Aid, both a drive away in New London or Newport |
| Full grocery store | Hannaford in New London |
| Pool, courts, community space | Eastman's South Cove Activity Center has all of it, but access runs through Eastman membership |
That last row raises a question about access. Grantham already has a pool, a fitness center, and tennis and pickleball courts. They just sit inside a private community that two-thirds of the town's own residents belong to, and the other third mostly doesn't. Walla told Valley News the Selectboard wants to talk about how non-Eastman residents might get access to some of what already exists there, while respecting Eastman's self-governance. That's a more delicate negotiation than just building something new from scratch, and it's probably why it's still a conversation and not a plan.
The Road Nobody Put on the Agenda, But Everyone Brought Up Anyway
One more thing surfaced in the survey that wasn't officially on the workshop's agenda: Route 10, the state-owned road that runs straight through the middle of town. Residents described it as severely deteriorated, with deep frost heaves and uneven surfaces chewing up vehicles. The Selectboard sent a letter to the state Department of Transportation about it. The response wasn't encouraging. The road was built on concrete slabs, which makes it difficult and expensive to fix, and the state told the town there's no formal statewide program for that kind of repair, just resurfacing where they're able.
It's a small detail next to the coffee shop conversation, but it says something similar. A lot of what residents are asking for in this Master Plan isn't really new development. It's Grantham asking whether the infrastructure it already has, a road, a private recreation community, one very good deli, can keep up with a town that's living here differently than it used to.
Where the Plan Actually Goes From Here
The 2026 Master Plan is finished and posted publicly now, the first full rewrite since 2017. The Master Plan Committee itself won't reconvene until 2035, since it's a body that meets once a decade by design. But that doesn't mean the work stops. A Master Plan Task Force is already meeting, most recently in August and again in September, specifically to turn the most commonly voiced survey concerns into actual changes to the town's zoning ordinance. That's the unglamorous but necessary next step between a resident saying "I wish we had a coffee shop" and a building permit that would let someone actually open one.
If you've been in Grantham a while, none of this will surprise you. If you're newer, or you split time between here and somewhere else, it's worth understanding that the town you're in is actively rewriting its own rules about what can get built and where, based on exactly the kind of everyday frustration that sent people to Grantham Village School in April.
Carter Auch keeps a close watch on what's shifting in towns like Grantham, not because a zoning ordinance update changes anyone's plans overnight, but because it's usually the clearest signal of where a town is actually headed. If you're curious about what a specific property or parcel in Grantham or the wider Upper Valley looks like against this backdrop, Carter Auch is a good person to call.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
