"Who wants to be the guy that closes a 200 year old general store? Certainly not me," Dave Dauphinais told NHPR in January 2025, two months after his wife, Erin, died.
That winter, plenty of people in town asked what would happen to the building at 150 Middle Road in Center Tuftonboro. When the answer came, it didn't come from an outside buyer or a developer. It came from the store's own back kitchen. In June 2023, Dave and Erin had let a small barbecue operation start cooking there. Two years later, that operation took over the whole store and reopened it as The Refuge BBQ & Mercantile.
The store was saved by a business it had helped get started.
What the Store Was Holding Together in January 2025
The store's own history says it had been running continuously since 1822. NHPR reporter Annmarie Timmins described it on a typical morning: regulars around a worn wooden table, close enough to reach the coffee pot.
Erin's parents had run the store for two decades. In 2016, Erin first suggested that she and Dave take it over, and Dave said no. Five years later he brought the idea back himself, because their youngest was finishing high school and his in-laws wanted to retire. Dave kept his day job and became a Tuftonboro selectman while Erin ran the shop.
The details NHPR collected about how Erin ran it explain why people felt the loss:
- She stocked the shelves and kept the pellet stove going on cold days.
- She made room for local artists to sell their work.
- During snowstorms she left thermoses of coffee on the porch for the town's plow drivers.
- She and Dave had just gotten town approval to serve beer and wine.
Then the store lost the post office too. According to NHPR, the post office had been in the store for most of its 200 years, and it moved out not long after Erin died, taking the daily foot traffic with it.
"Since they closed the post office, Tuftonboro doesn't exist anymore. And without this store, it's going to go away even more," Guy Pike told NHPR. "And that would be a tragedy."
Pike told the station he had lived in Tuftonboro for 70 years, lived half a mile from the store, and started almost every morning at that table. Another regular, Faye Friedrich, said she won over the locals by bringing pies every weekend back when she was still driving up from Massachusetts. It took five years. "Once you're a flatlander, you're always a flatlander," she said.
Three Options, and the One Dave Wanted Least
Dave told NHPR he couldn't run the store without Erin. He saw three options: sell it, turn it into apartments, or lease it. Selling was his last choice. He said he was talking with a couple of people interested in leasing, which would keep the store open.
His later account on the store's website adds why he had to close it as a general store at all. Staffing problems forced it, and after some searching he "couldn't come up with a way to keep it open as a general store." His wording matters. What he couldn't find was a way to keep it a general store. The building could still be the store in a new form.
The Tenant Already Cooking in the Back
The Refuge's own account is the part of the story the January 2025 coverage couldn't include yet. Here is the timeline as the business tells it:
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| June 2023 | Started serving slow-smoked barbecue out of the general store's back kitchen, thanks to "our dear friends, Dave and the late Erin" |
| 2024 | Went on the road with a food trailer to food truck festivals around the region |
| 2025 | Cut back to Thursdays at the Wolfeboro Farmers Market |
| June 2025 | An opportunity came up to take over the historic General Store space |
| November 2025 | Officially opened during the Tuftonboro Holiday Festival |
Between June and November 2025, the owners say they spent months renovating, aiming to "honor the rich history and rustic charm of the old store." In their words, "We knew the community needed a place to gather, swap stories, and share a meal."
Dave's description of the handoff is short: "friends from church took over the store as the Refuge BBQ and Mercantile." He says they "have done amazing work to both update the store and keep it 'traditional' at the same time," and he calls their product "top notch."
The lease Dave hoped for in January 2025 went to people who had already cooked in the building and already knew the owners. It also went to people with a following of their own, built over two years of trailer stops and Thursdays at the Wolfeboro market.
Same Building, Different Hours
The Refuge isn't a copy of the old store, and it doesn't claim to be. On its website it calls itself "slow-smoked BBQ meets a curated artisan shop," and it highlights brisket and local gifts. Local gifts on the shelves echo the space Erin gave local artists, though the business itself doesn't make that comparison.
The hours are different too. NHPR described the old store as a place where regulars gathered most mornings. The Refuge's website lists these hours:
- Monday through Thursday: closed
- Friday and Saturday: 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
- Sunday: 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
The site doesn't give a date for those hours, so check before you drive over, especially as the season changes.
The business also explains its schedule. It's two people in the kitchen, one of them named Allison, making every menu item from scratch each week. Nothing arrives premade. They don't take phone, text, or online orders because they can't answer calls and serve the line at the same time. They ask anyone feeding 10 or more people to message at least a week ahead. "Every week is a shot in the dark with how much to make," the post reads.
So if you show up late on a Saturday hoping for brisket, you may be disappointed. It's the same kind of limit that closed the old store, a business that rests on a very small crew, now running on a schedule that crew can keep up.
A First Anniversary on Holiday Festival Weekend
The Refuge opened during the Tuftonboro Holiday Festival in November 2025, so its first anniversary lines up with this year's festival.
One regional event listing shows the 2026 festival on Friday through Sunday, November 13 to 15, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., with Mountain Road as the location. We haven't seen those dates confirmed by the organizers yet, so check the Tuftonboro Holiday Festival's Facebook page before you plan around them.
For a sense of the format, the Lakes Region Tourism Association's 2024 listing set the festival in Center Tuftonboro and described a map-guided, multi-stop shopping day. Stops included home and gift items, estate goods, handcrafted and Native American jewelry, holiday decor, vintage ornaments, and live-edge furniture by B. Palmer. That listing pointed visitors to the festival's Facebook page for the map. This year's stops may be different.
The Rest of Middle Road This Fall
The store isn't the only gathering place on Middle Road. The Tuftonboro Free Library is at 221 Middle Road, and its meeting room calendar fills up over the next six weeks:
- Tuesday, October 20, 10:00 a.m. to noon: Watercolor Basics Class
- Wednesday, October 21, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.: Tuftonboro Association Candidate's Night
- Saturday, October 24, 10:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.: Friends of the Library Annual Meeting & Author Luncheon
- Monday, November 2, 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.: Tuftonboro Garden Group
October 24 is the one Saturday where both places line up. The Friends' luncheon starts at 10:30, and The Refuge opens its doors at 11:00.
Down the road in Melvin Village, Meredith Village Savings Bank marked ten years at its branch there in May 2026. Branch staff chose a $1,000 donation to Abenaki Tower for the anniversary.
The general store made it through its hardest stretch because Dave and Erin had made room for one small business in their kitchen, and that business made room for the store in return. "You can get all those things, but you also get the conversations," Dave said of the store his wife ran. Since November 2025, the friends who had cooked in that back kitchen took on the job of keeping those conversations going.
Places like The Refuge are a big part of what makes a home in Tuftonboro worth what it is. If you're curious how your Center Tuftonboro or Melvin Village home fits into today's market, Ana Freitas is happy to walk you through it in English or Portuguese. Get your instant home valuation.
