History of the Ripton Community Coffee House

– according to Richard Ruane

The idea of the Ripton Community Coffee House began at the Ripton house-warming party/jam session at Richard Ruane and Andrea Chesman’s house in November 1994. People at the gathering included Tim Price, Su White, Ian Pounds, Sallie Mack, and Mark Mulqueen, later the first officers and volunteers of this concert series. A conversation started about how things used to be (a favorite topic of conversation in Vermont). There used to be community gatherings at the Ripton Community House, including semi-regular contra dances and volunteer fire department spaghetti dinners. Many of the musicians at the party had played at the Community House for events, but by 1994, the Community House was used only for the annual town meeting and an occasional wedding or special event. Wouldn’t it be great, we all agreed, to have a regular community gathering to give people a chance to see their neighbors and hear good music? The Community House was the perfect place for it, and it was just sitting there unused!

The discussion continued over the next several months. We decided to try offering a coffeehouse-style concert series with an open mike, followed by a featured performer. We’d charge only a small amount at the door to make it accessible to the entire community. We’d sell refreshments to help pay our expenses as well. We approached the Town Selectboard, and they were very supportive of having a once-a-month concert series at the Community House.

The Ripton Community Coffee House officially started on May 6, 1995, as a benefit for the concert series. The first concert’s open mike featured Andrew Marks, Nelda Clemens and Tim Price, Rodger Hamilton, Hannah Cohen (step-dancing to a boom box) and Jonathan McDonough. The main act was the trio of Rick Klein, Sallie Mack, and Richard Ruane. More than one hundred people showed up and (at $3.00 for adults and $1.50 for children and seniors as well as all the money for the baked goods and beverages) we managed to raise $473 to get the Ripton Community Coffee House going.

Quite frankly, we expected sixty or seventy people to show up for the first few concerts until the novelty wore off. We figured the audience would dwindle to twenty or thirty within eight months. Luckily, we were wrong. Our June concert with Womensing drew more people than our opening show. The July and August shows didn’t do all that well, but attendance picked up again with the fall. As we went through the cold months, we continued to draw more and more. The audience was a total mix of ages, from babes in arms to the over-eighty crowd. Whole families came with all their children and students showed up from Middlebury College.

Soon we decided to have refreshment sales at every second concert be fundraisers for area non-profits. That organization would bring in their own baked goods, run the kitchen for the night and keep the money they made. We did this to support our local non-profits and to keep our volunteer cookie and brownie bakers from burning out. It also introduced some people to our concerts who might not have come otherwise.

Over the years our price of admission rose from $3 (musicians deserve to be paid properly), but we kept our policy that anyone could come in and pay what they felt they could afford. Our attendance grew to average a little more than one hundred people per show, with a few sold-out shows every year. We had many regular attendees (some bringing their own cushions to put on the folding chairs) and we were able to book great performers from Vermont, and across North America and beyond. Our shows began to be recorded by the Northeast Addison Television (NEAT) based in Bristol, Vermont. All those shows can still be seen on their website at neatbristol.com.

When covid hit in 2020 we cancelled the rest of our spring schedule. Knowing that all the touring musicians had just lost their income, we decided to start our upcoming fall schedule virtually. We signed on with a streaming service and had our performers present their music online from their own homes. The concerts were streamed through our Facebook and YouTube channels, with us hosting and running a text chat during the show. The performers were paid via viewer donations, with us kicking in some additional money. These were very successful; the audiences were as hungry to see live performances as the performers were hungry to perform. We kept streaming after we went back to in-person concerts until the number of people streaming our shows declined.

For our live shows post-pandemic, we relocated to Burnham Hall in Lincoln. It has a full theatrical stage raised more than three feet from the floor and set back from the front row of the audience. This greatly reduced the risk of virus transmission compared to the Community House where the platform of the stage is only eight inches tall. Burnham Hall also has permanently installed stage lights and a sound system, both of which have to be hauled in and out of the Ripton Community House.

For more than a decade we had started each of our annual meetings with the question, “Do we want to keep doing this?” with all the board enthusiastically saying yes. But in 2023, it turned into a serious discussion. For several years we had not been enlisting any new volunteers, and the core group had been getting smaller (and older). The work of putting on the concerts hadn’t lessened any. At that meeting we also talked about moving back to the Ripton Community House.

We ended that meeting with the decision to end the Ripton Community Coffee House. Beth Duquette (our long-time co-director and primary booking person) and Mark Mulqueen (our soundman) live in Lincoln. With the Ripton Community Coffee House ending, they decided to start their own music series at Burnham Hall, the ongoing “Burnham Presents.” A little while after that annual meeting, Richard Ruane had second thoughts. He convinced the rest of our crew to try another season back at the Ripton Community House. At our 2024 annual meeting however, it was decided to end our monthly concert series, concluding with our 29th anniversary concert.

Around the time we started the Ripton Community Coffee House, there were very few places in our area presenting acoustic music. There was the Burlington Coffeehouse, an hour north from Ripton, and a couple festivals, including the Champlain Valley Festival (largely guided by Mark Sustic), and the Middlebury Festival on the Green (with Carol and Harvey Green including acoustic music in that programing). But the festivals were only there for a week or less in the summer. Now there are several places in the greater area presenting this type of music, including Burnham Presents, just a short drive north along the spine of the Green Mountains from Ripton. It’s good to know that this music continues to be presented in the area by people with a great love for it.

In our twenty-nine years we presented 312 concerts, including the virtual ones during covid, and provided a place for other non-profit organizations’ bake sales more than 180 times. Including the open mike performers, we had just under 900 different performers on our stage. If we also include those who have performed more than once (featured performers and open mike performers), we have presented 1,422 individual performances.

We are very grateful to all who have attended our shows, enjoyed, and appreciated the music, bought baked goods and performers’ merchandise, and then even helped put away chairs at the end of the night. We are also grateful to have presented so many performers who managed to make their way up our mountain roads, through all kinds of Vermont weather, and still arrived ready to play brilliantly. It has been a joy and a privilege to have such wonderful musicians grace our stage.

Our special thanks to all our various board and core-team members, our bakers, the Vermont Coffee Company for donating delicious coffee, and our hard-working, changing band of volunteers over the years. They have set up chairs, acted as MC, run the kitchen, helped with parking, put up posters, taken money at the door, hauled equipment, swept and mopped floors, and done whatever else needed to be done. We are so grateful for all the work and all the joy everyone has helped bring.

And an additional thank you to the town of Ripton, its town officers, its townspeople, the Ripton Elementary School, and our nearest neighbor, the Chipman Inn, for their support. We could never have been the Ripton Community Coffee House without the Ripton community.

We welcome any thoughts, recollections or comments you would like to make. Please email them to rcchfolks@gmail.com