Other Stops Along the Way

“Where do you get all the stuff from?” we asked farmers. There was pretty much just one answer: Miles Supply.

With its flagship store in Barre and additional locations in Pennsylvania, Texas, Georgia, and Minnesota, Miles Supply has been a family business for over 70 years.

They are first and foremost a granite work supplier, and have expanded to supply industrial equipment in all corners of the United States.  Here in Central Vermont, Miles Supply, as a CDL store, is the unofficial supplier for the maple industry. The place where you go to get buckets, stickers, and equipment to create your syrup.  Of all the places we stopped, this was the busiest!

Maple would be a hobby rather than an industry if Vermonters did not sell it.

At Waitsfield’s Addison West, we saw owner Monique Bonner’s particular vision for selling syrup.  Monique left a two-decades tech job in 2020 to focus on a small series of home-goods stores.  The first is in Middlebury, and she opened the second shortly after.  The second shop’s Waitsfield location is in the site of the former The Store. 

Monique’s purchase of The Store and conversion to Addison West’s second home was welcome to many Valley residents and visitors who had decades of fond memories and almost-forgotten birthdays with its previous incarnation.  She took care to acknowledge and expand on the original values of the shop.  Under her eye, some of the perhaps too-sweet gifts of yore have been replaced with hipper, more modern gift fare.

Local artists and products are heavily featured, along with artisan items from independent luxury home brands.  Here we saw the famous Runamok syrup at last, sparkling with edible glitter even through its glass.  Retailers like Monique are a key part of maple’s success story.  A beautiful shop like Addison West tells us a story, and whether we’re dropping in from down the street or six states away, the story inspires us to purchase a little bit of Vermont to carry along with us.