If you drove past 150 Middle Road in early 2025 and saw the windows dark, you were not wrong to think Tuftonboro had lost something. For two hundred and three years, a building at that spot on Route 109A had done what the town clerk's office, the church bulletin, and the Facebook group could never quite manage on their own: it kept everyone in the loop. You went in for milk and came out knowing whose plow driver needed a thermos of coffee left on the porch during a storm, whose grandson made the honor roll, and who still owed Guy Pike five dollars from a bet about the Red Sox.
That last part is not an exaggeration. Pike has lived in Tuftonboro for seventy years, sits on the budget committee and the school board, and lives half a mile from the store. He starts most mornings at the wooden table by the coffee pot, the same table where locals learned, over conversation rather than a phone call, that a neighbor's cane needed a rubber tip replaced. As he told New Hampshire Public Radio while the store's future hung in the balance, "we're a pretty tight knit community, even though we may not visit each other's houses. But when a fellow needs a hand, there's usually a hand sitting here at the table."
Here is the part that has not fully made its way back around Tuftonboro yet, even among people who read the NHPR piece when it ran: the table is back. Not as a general store. As something narrower, run on fewer days, by different hands, and it is worth understanding exactly what changed and why, because the shape of what replaced the store tells you something true about what small Lakes Region towns can and cannot sustain in 2026.
Two Centuries, One Address, a Rotating Cast
The building itself predates almost every other commercial structure in Carroll County. Deacon Leathers built what was likely Tuftonboro's first store in 1822 for the sum of one hundred dollars, and its first shopkeeper, Daniel Pickering, also ran stores at Goose Corner and in Wolfeboro Village. The next owner, Samuel Leavitt, served as selectman and town clerk while running the counter, and by the account handed down through the Tuftonboro Association, he "accumulated quite a fortune here and continued in business until his death." Before Tuftonboro had a public library, the store functioned as one, and in 1837 Leavitt left three hundred dollars to help establish the real thing.
The post office moved in under the name Mackerel Corner when it was established on August 6, 1851, which is a detail worth knowing the next time someone tells you Center Tuftonboro has always been called Center Tuftonboro. Ownership passed through the Pinkham family in the late 1910s and into the early 1930s, then the Hodgdons from the Second World War into the mid-1960s, then Bill Rollins, then Ted and Peg Hebden. Erin Dauphinais's parents ran it for two decades after that, and when they were ready to retire, Erin took it over in 2016, with her husband Dave keeping his day job and eventually becoming a Tuftonboro selectman himself while she ran the store, kept the pellet stove going, made room for local artists to sell their work, and left thermoses of coffee out for the town's plow crews on bad-weather mornings.
What Actually Happened in 2025
Erin died in November 2024, after a six-month fight with a rare form of breast cancer. Dave has said plainly that staffing was the reason the store could not stay open as a general store without her, and by early 2025 its future was genuinely uncertain. He weighed three options: sell it, convert it to apartments, or lease it. Selling, he told NHPR, was his last choice, because "who wants to be the guy that closes a 200 year old general store."
He did not sell it. He leased it. In November of 2025, friends from his church took over the space and reopened it as The Refuge BBQ and Mercantile, and it has been operating out of the same building on Middle Road since.
What's There Now
The Refuge is not a general store in the sense the building has held for two centuries. There is no post office counter, no full grocery aisle, no seven-day availability for a gallon of milk on a Tuesday morning. What it is instead: a husband-and-wife-run barbecue kitchen paired with a curated small retail shop, working out of the same corner where Erin used to make space for local artists. The buns, the cookies, and the barbecue sauces are all handmade on site, a detail the owners emphasize themselves, and the name comes from Psalm 34:8, "taste and see that the Lord is good."
It runs Friday through Sunday, eleven to six, and is closed Monday through Thursday. That is a real change from what the building used to offer, and it is worth being direct about it if you are the kind of Tuftonboro resident who used to duck in on a weekday for a sandwich or a forgotten ingredient. That errand no longer exists here. What exists instead is a weekend destination, and the early reviews suggest it is filling something like the old role in a narrower window. One visitor in November 2025 wrote about the pleasure of seeing local people keep a family business running and a place for neighbors to sit and chat. Another, in March 2026, praised the food and the family operation while wishing there were more seating, wondering aloud whether that might change come summer. By May 2026, Yelp's own roundup of barbecue in Tuftonboro placed The Refuge at the top of the list, ahead of half a dozen other regional smokehouses.
If you want to see for yourself what the mercantile side looks like alongside the smoker, the business keeps its current menu and hours posted directly on its own site.
Why Weekends Only Is Not a Downgrade
It would be easy to read the shift from seven-day general store to three-day BBQ counter as a story about decline. The wider picture argues against that. New Hampshire Public Radio reported in March 2026 that the same forces squeezing Tuftonboro's store have hit country stores across the state. The Francestown Village Store, itself a 203-year-old institution in the Monadnock region, announced it would close in 2025. The Canterbury Country Store shut its doors in January 2026, unable to compete with nearby grocery chains and big box stores. Some towns have responded by taking the profit motive out of the equation entirely: Historic Harrisville, a nonprofit, bought its town's general store in 2008 specifically so it could run at a loss in service of the community rather than chase a margin, and its director has described the arrangement as one where residents feel the difference and support the store more generously because of it. Other towns are betting on the traditional for-profit model still working in the right hands, the way two sisters announced plans earlier this year to reopen the Gilsum Village Store after one of them spotted a for-rent sign in the window.
Tuftonboro landed on a third option, one that neither leans on charity nor tries to compete with a supermarket on selection or hours. A weekend-only kitchen paired with a small retail counter asks less of its operators, in staffing and inventory both, than a daily general store ever did, and it still gives the building back its old function on the days it is open. The table by the coffee pot is not gone. It just keeps different hours now, and if you have been avoiding Middle Road because the last thing you heard was that the store closed for good, you are working from information that is more than a year out of date.
If You Are Planning a Visit
- Address: 150 Middle Road, Center Tuftonboro, NH 03816
- Hours: Friday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed Monday through Thursday
- What it's known for: slow-smoked barbecue, scratch-made buns and cookies, and a small mercantile section inside the historic storefront
- Seating is limited, so a weekday lunch run is no longer an option here, but a Saturday stop is
The building's other longtime neighbor on the water side of town, Melvin Village Marina, has held its own ground through the same stretch of years, and if you are already out that way on a Saturday for barbecue, it is worth knowing where the public landings and launches sit around Tuftonboro Neck and Mirror Lake before you plan the rest of the day on the water.
Tuftonboro did not lose its gathering place. It just relearned, the way a lot of small New Hampshire towns are relearning right now, that a two-hundred-year-old building can hold a new kind of business without losing the thing that made people walk through the door in the first place.
If you already call Tuftonboro home and you are weighing a move within the Lakes Region, or you are helping a parent, a sibling, or a friend think through what waterfront or in-town living actually looks like here, Meredith Connor knows this stretch of Winnipesaukee down to the details that do not show up in a listing photo. Let's Connect — Find Your Lake Life.
