Polebridge Mercantile is for sale, recipes included
Written by MICHAEL JAMISON
Photographed by KURT WILSON of the Missoulian
POLEBRIDGE – You lose things as you travel north.
First to go is the cell phone connection, lost before you’re barely out
of town.
Then the power lines disappear, then the driveways.
No houses, no streetlights, no billboards.
When you lose the pavement, you’re still just a dozen miles out of town, “but you have the feeling you’ve crossed a boundary,” said Deb Kaufman.
And still the road tracks north. Trees grow tight to the track, and you lose the horizon. The road turns “all potholey and nasty and dusty,” Kaufman said, and you lose speed – or your muffler.
Left behind is town and all the hurry-up that means. Out ahead is wildness, if not wilderness, the unknown and the other.
It’s like some ancient metaphor, this road as penance, stripping away worldly distractions one by one before you can find what really matters.
And there, at the end of the road, the rapture, heavenly manna. Fresh-baked bread. And cinnamon rolls. And sinful huckleberry bearclaws, piping hot straight from the oven.
“We’re like a cozy enclave in the wilderness,” Kaufman said of her tiny store. “The length of the road, the primitive condition of the road, it makes a psychological transition, and gives the illusion that you’re very, very far away.”
For the sale price of $950,000: you get 22 acres, the big red Mercantile, four rental cabins, all of the outbuildings and inventory, and Dan Kaufman will teach you how to make the cinnamon rolls. Photo by Kurt Wilson
Town’s not 40 miles south, “but by the time you get here you feel like you’re in a very special place. The journey up makes people more receptive to what’s here.”
What’s here, once you lose everything that must be lost, is a civilized surprise, a bright red building standing stiff upright and square shouldered, tall against brilliant blue sky, set hard to the craggy backbone of Glacier National Park. It’s an old building, what Westerners call historic, the sort of place hopeful homesteaders built as a promise, or perhaps a prayer, to prosperity.
That the Polebridge Mercantile, full of food and coffee and people, has not fallen derelict here so far from the grid, so close to the Canadian line, is testament to the vision of Kaufman and her husband, Dan, as well as to their remarkable baking skills.
That’s the real surprise within the surprise – this bakery in this mercantile in this far-flung landscape.
But it’s time now, Kaufman said, for another adventure, up yet another road into the unknown.
“The Mercantile has become an icon in western Montana,” she said. “People have an emotional attachment to this store.
“Some people actually cried when they saw the for-sale sign in the window.”
Bill Adair built the Polebridge Mercantile here on the western banks of the North Fork Flathead River back in 1914, just four years after his neighbor, Glacier National Park, became a park.
He added an icehouse and a shop and soon became the social and business center of a growing and rusticated backwoods neighborhood, not to mention a gateway to Glacier.
Adair’s first wife, Jessie, and second wife, Emma, are remembered as hard-working hardscrabble women, running the store and the post office and doing most of the handy chores.
Bill, on the other hand, is remembered as a fine fly-fisherman, a fellow who sure didn’t mind a drink now and then, and as a man who could grow king-size cabbages.
Dan Kaufman doesn’t grow cabbages. He bakes.
Cookies and croissants and tasty pocket sandwiches.
People visit Glacier Park’s stunning scenery, but on their way back home, on buses and trains and planes, they talk about Dan Kaufman’s baking. People from Israel and New Zealand and Wisconsin – yes, even Wisconsin – hear about his store, and come to Glacier for the cinnamon buns.
Now you can buy all his recipes for $950,000. For that price tag, he’ll also stick around awhile and teach you how to bake, and how to run the store. And he’ll throw in 22 acres, the big red Mercantile, the four rental cabins, the outbuildings, the generator, the liquor license and the jaw-dropping views of Glacier’s limestone Livingston Range.
You’ll also get the Kaufmans’ entire inventory, in all its all-purpose weirdness. Because the Merc remains both an essential shop for locals and a global travelers’ rest stop.
You can buy soot remover and power-steering fluid and hand puppets at the Merc. And goat’s milk soap and Rice-A-Roni, shoelaces and Tums, wool socks, hemp socks and Spam.
They sell organic wine and Monopoly boards and chainsaw oil.
Out back, in the outhouse, is a recent copy of Men’s Journal, with a cover story about “97 Perfect Things,” gadgets and gizmos for the wider world’s wants. None of those things can be bought at the Merc, but really, if they don’t have it, you probably don’t need it.
The outhouse, while perfectly serviceable, did not make the list of perfect things, and marks clearly the list between what we want and what we need.
Every morning, the Merc’s wooden floor creaks to the sound of rap grooving from Dan’s bakery – “pow-er to the peace-ful” – and the smells fill every nook and cranny.
The Merc walls are hung with rusty old bits of days gone by – loggers’ boots and lanterns, ice cream makers and a cobwebbed mounted mountain goat.
Above, exposed rafters are chiseled with axe marks, not so much milled as gouged and torn and beaten into shape, from a day when making boards wasn’t all that different from blacksmithing. There’s no sheetrock covering the walls, just burlap, but it smells like butter.
And that’s why it works.
The Kaufman’s could have kept this place a simple old-time merc – it’s on the National Historic Register, after all – and a certain sort of folk would have come to visit, just as they do antique general stores across the country, to see the rusty tools on the walls.
Or the Kaufmans could have gutted it, yuppified it, put in bright maple floors and big windows and fancy stools to go with the tasty bakery.
But they didn’t. Instead, they found a sort of middle ground, a pleasant surprise just when you think, after that long road, that you already know what to expect.
This isn’t quaint, or contrived. The store is a genuine piece of history, and the bakery a genuinely top-notch treat.
“It’s kind of a must-see place,” said Bob Sorensen, who travels annually from Billings to eat pastries and see the fall foliage. “It’s a real connection to something that’s not cookie-cutter. It’s one of a kind. It’s the original. We love it.”
But does he love it $950,000 worth?
“There’s some appeal,” he admits, “but it’s probably not realistic.”
Of course, that didn’t stop the Kaufmans.
It was a sunny day, Deb remembers, coolish, June. The newlyweds with the tiny infant were visiting Missoula from their home in north Idaho and wanted to go for a drive.
Deb lobbied to head south, into the Bitterroot, but Dan had his sights set north. OK, Deb said, so long as she could stop in Bigfork, see the sights, shop around a bit.
“We were driving up the east side of Flathead Lake,” she remembers, “and Dan looked at me out of the blue and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat if the Polebridge Mercantile was for sale?’ ”
They’d been talking about leaving Idaho, opening a business they could run together, and they’d been to Polebridge, long ago, on vacation.
When the couple hit Bigfork, Dan packed baby Connor into his stroller while she picked up a local real estate magazine. And there, smack dab in the middle, was a picture of the Merc – for sale.
“All of a sudden, we had this purpose,” Deb said.
They didn’t shop, didn’t stop, just packed the stroller right back up and went straightaway to Whitefish, where the real estate agent lived. Called him at 10 p.m. on a Saturday, and owned the place before summer was gone.
The Merc: serves a year-round population of 12 in Polebridge, but draws a steady stream of tourists. Photo by Kurt Wilson
Dan and Deb moved in Sept. 21, 1994, baby on hip and not a clue – no idea how to live off the grid, how to run a rustic general store, how to make do in a tiny town with a year-round population of 12.
“I was a geriatric social worker, and Dan was a baker,” Deb said. “We had this new baby, and here we were, with winter coming fast.”
They set up some furniture on the porch, so folks could sit a spell, then put a round table inside with four old chairs. Deb made up some coffee, “and we decided we needed something to go with the coffee.”
Dan cobbled together a kitchen and started baking.
It was a slow start – “the slowest day was in the winter, when only one person came in, and she bought on credit,” Deb said – but then things picked up.
The wildlife scientists – studying bears and wolves and mountain lions in this remote valley – found the coffee, “and they kept us going that first winter.”
Then the tourists, the kayakers, the fancy new owners of those fancy new homes.
The bakery fed customers to the saloon and restaurant next door, and the saloon fed them right back. Young people found Polebridge for the annual music festival, mushers found the annual dogsled race, and a phenomena was born.
“We’re sort of on the map now,” Deb said. “People all over the world know about the Polebridge Mercantile. Sometimes, they come all the way up here and don’t even go into the park. They come just for the bakery.”
Connor is a teenager now, homeschooled upstairs above the bakery. The Kaufmans are pushing their way out of their 50s. Their aging Karelian bear dog is down to three legs “and it’s time to see what’s next,” Deb said.
“It’s OK,” Dan said of the for-sale sign in the window. “I’m not afraid to do something else. It’s just great that we’ve had a community that’s allowed us to come up here in the middle of everything and make a living.”
The Merc – “funky and cool and neat” – is the sort of place you either get or you don’t, Deb said. Some don’t want to leave. “Others want to know what’s the best way to get out of here, and is it paved?”
What she needs is someone who gets it and has some money, too. So far, the folks with money enough don’t want to run a store, and the dreamers with the energy for the long haul don’t have the cash.
It’s no surprise. The Merc was for sale three long years before the Kaufmans snatched it up. Maybe, Deb said, there’s a middle ground, room for a partner who would help them take a break now and again, but not buy it outright.
“What we’re doing right now, it pretty much takes up all of our time,” she said. “It’d be nice to slow down a little bit.”
Because there aren’t any days with one credit customer anymore. Today, it’s a steady stream, nonstop, year-round.
For many locals, it’s the only phone, the meeting place, the go-to spot for medical or other emergencies. For neighbor Joan Hedin, it’s a half-dozen eggs for unexpected company. For tourists, it’s the last stop before Glacier’s wilds, the outpost with the camping supplies and strawberry rolls.
And for lots of people, it’s the dream of what’s possible, which of course, is exactly what it was to Bill Adair way back in 1914.
“One day this guy came in,” Deb said, “looked around, soaked it all in, turned to me and said, ‘What did you do to deserve all this?’
“I’ve thought about that a lot, because a lot of people see Polebridge as a utopia, or a place so special it’s outside the real world.”
Maybe that’s because of what they must leave behind on the way in. Or maybe because life here is a choice, deliberately made.
Or maybe it’s because of what the Kaufmans have built, here on the edge of real life.
“This is not a fancy place, by any means,” Deb said, “but it’s a home.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at
1-800-366-7186 or by e-mail at mjamison@missoulian.com.
Reach photographer Kurt Wilson at (406) 523-5244
or by e-mail at kwilson@missoulian.com.
