The Cambridge Village Market Almost Didn't Survive Its First Month Under New Owners

Three weeks. That's how long Ron and Linda Frey had owned the Cambridge Village Market before the Lamoille River decided to test them.

On July 11, 2023, with the Lamoille River spilling over Route 15 and cars being turned away at both ends of the village center, Ron Frey was out back of his brand-new store trudging through floodwater. He'd sent his employees home. He kept the doors open anyway, because the market was one of the few buildings in the village with its power still on, and he figured people would need somewhere to gather. Within hours, water was pouring into the basement. By the time it stopped, the store had taken on roughly eight feet of it, ruining food, freezers, and electrical panels, in a building the Freys didn't carry flood insurance on because it sits outside the mapped flood zone.

If you live in Cambridge village, you already know the market. You've bought gas there before work, grabbed a sandwich from the deli on your way home, or stopped for kerosene in the middle of a January cold snap. What you may not know is how close it came to not making it through its first summer under new ownership, or what its response to that flood says about why this particular building has stayed the town's actual gathering place for more than 170 years.

A Store That's Worn Three Names

The building at 113 South Main Street has been a grocery since it went up in the 1850s. It spent part of the early 1900s as The Willey Brothers Store, then transitioned into The Cambridge Community Lockers, where locals rented refrigerator and freezer space before home refrigeration became standard. It survived the catastrophic flood of 1927, one of the worst in Vermont history.

Bruce Macmillan bought the store in 1992 and spent three decades expanding it to twice its original footprint, adding gas pumps along the way. In 2008, the Vermont Grocers' Association named it Retailer of the Year. Macmillan finally sold the store in June 2023, after 31 years behind the counter.

He sold it to Ron and Linda Frey, along with their daughter Erica Hayes, a family already running Erica's American Diner in Fairfax and Uncle Ronnie's Deli and The Frey Family Deli in Milton. Hayes lives in Cambridge with her husband and young child, which mattered to the family. They wanted the store to stay in the community it served, not become an absentee investment. Macmillan stayed on for a few days after closing to help the Freys and Hayes get the hang of things. When a local reporter asked him for a comment on handing over a store he'd run for over 30 years, he kept it short: he thanked the town for shopping there.

Ron Frey summed up his own plan for the place just as plainly. Asked what he'd change, he said the first thing you do with a successful business is change nothing, and the first thing you do with a failed one is change everything. The only difference longtime shoppers would notice, he said, would be a bigger prepared foods section, leaning on the family's deli experience.

Then the River Came Up

Three weeks after that sale closed, Vermont got hit with the storm that would become known statewide as the flood of 2023. Cambridge took some of the worst of it. VTDigger found Frey outside his own store that afternoon, wading through rising water while fire alarms went off nearby and a sign propped against a flooded church read simply "remember."

The market's basement took the worst of it. Frey later told a reporter he had a hundred people ahead of him on a waiting list to get water damage repaired, and that despite owning a building right along the Lamoille, he wasn't in an official flood zone, so he had no flood coverage to file a claim against.

He made a call most new business owners in his position wouldn't have made three weeks into ownership. Rather than watch a flooded basement's worth of inventory spoil, the family loaded what they could into trucks and gave it away. Some of it they distributed from their diner in Fairfax. Some went out the market's own doors once the worst water receded. A local news crew from WCAX caught the scene the next day: dozens of people filling bags with free groceries, some of them driving in from as far as Essex to help redistribute what they picked up to others in need. One woman told the crew she brought her kids specifically so they could see how Vermont responds when things go wrong.

Frey's read on the whole situation, offered to that same crew while his staff pumped eight feet of water out of the basement, was about as Vermont as an answer gets. He said he believed everything happens for a reason, and that they'd just have to figure out what the reason was.

What Stayed Closed While the Market Reopened

The flood hit more than one business in the village. According to a follow-up report from the News & Citizen, Red Leaf Gluten-Free Brewing was still without power days later. The Family Table, which had only reopened the year before after a two-year closure, took six feet of water in its own basement and had to fundraise to cover the damage. The Cambridge Community Center's fieldhouse floors buckled and stayed closed. Three Mountain Roofing had employees evacuated by out-of-state rescue crews from their flooded housing in the village.

Against that backdrop, the market reopened within about a week, thanks to volunteers and electricians working around the clock. Hayes told the paper her family turned the store into an informal donation center during the recovery, even putting one displaced family up in a hotel for a few nights. She said they'd felt uncomfortable simply asking for money, so instead they asked people to donate funds and gave product back in return.

That's the detail worth sitting with if you've ever wondered what actually makes a small-town general store different from a convenience chain. It isn't the age of the building or the charm of a hand-painted sign. It's what the people behind the counter choose to do when the systems around them stop working. Cambridge didn't have a functioning grocery store, a working community center, or a clear sense of where to gather that week. For a stretch of days, the market filled all three roles at once, for a family that had owned the place for less than two months.

Same Counter, Three Years Later

If you've stopped in recently for a coffee or a tank of gas, you already know how this part goes. The Freys and Hayes are still running the market today, still stocking the deli, still selling gas, kerosene, and propane out of the same building their predecessor Bruce Macmillan spent thirty years expanding. The prepared foods section Ron Frey promised to grow is still there too, and it's the kind of place where online reviews keep circling back to the same word: accommodating.

None of that is a coincidence. It's the same instinct that had Frey keeping the doors open during a flood rather than closing early for safety, and the same instinct that had the family giving away a flooded basement's worth of inventory instead of writing it off. A country store earns the word "authentic" by doing the unglamorous work of showing up, especially on the days it would be easier not to.

That's really the thread running through the market's whole history, from its first decades as a grocery through its stint as neighborhood cold storage to its current run as the place half the village stops at before work. The building has worn different names and different owners across 170-some years, but the job has stayed the same: be the place people can count on, especially when not much else in the village is working.

If you're a longtime Cambridge or Jeffersonville resident who's ever wondered about the store you drive past every day, now you know a little more of what's behind the counter. And if you're thinking about your next move in this corner of Lamoille County, whether that's a first home, a move up, or a piece of land, I'd be glad to help you get to know the rest of the community the way you now know this one. You can reach out to Jill Richardson anytime for a free consultation and home valuation.