Danielle French is an entrepreneur, mom, writer, and podcaster who posts on "cooking, entertaining, decorating, entrepreneurship, mothering four adult daughters, playing pickleball, and exploring" at southpondhome.substack.com. The Festival of Miniatures will return this year on Nov. 27 and will run through Jan. 10, 2027. For more information, visit festivalofminiatures.org.
PONTYPOOL, ONTARIO, CANADA-Over the holidays, my whole family visited my parents in my hometown of Brattleboro. I graduated from Brattleboro Union High School in 1978, moved to Toronto, and returned only occasionally to visit my folks.
During those visits, strolling through downtown was always a favorite activity. The stores on Main Street were family-run and quirky. Brattleboro felt then - and still does - as though it were oddly stuck in the 1960s.
This wasn't just nostalgia; my hometown became a hub for the '60s and '70s counterculture movement as people moved back to the land, seeking alternative and creative lifestyles and experimenting with communal living.
My earliest recollections of Brattleboro are of hippies hanging out, playing music on Main Street. I was thrilled whenever I walked by. They carried a cool, effortless vibe with their long hair, guitars, and bell-bottom jeans.
The convergence of these hippies during the Vietnam anti-war years cemented Brattleboro as an oasis for quiet, healthy living. Artists, professors, and musicians planted roots, and they still make up much of the community today.
Back then, I felt Brattleboro was light years ahead of almost anywhere else. You could attend topical lectures at the library, classical music festivals attracting top international talent, or exhibits at the train-station-turned-museum-and-art-center. The local food co-op offered the best vegetables and a far more interesting variety of groceries than what we had in my area at the time.
Sam's department store was its own adventure - a place where you munched on free popcorn, wandered through a maze of expansions, and picked up sneakers, snow pants, wool socks, and, of course, jeans. I bought my first pair of Wrangler jeans at age 12 and, 50 years later, the changing rooms had never, well, changed.
As soon as my girls were able to walk, we made our own ritual of Main Street. We perused secondhand shops, munched popcorn from Sam's, stopped at Beadnik's, browsed sports attire at Burrows, warmed up with hot chocolate at Mocha Joe's, and ended with bagels. Mann's, once the only department store in town, eventually turned into an art gallery - but, somehow, not much ever really changed.
In the 1970s, Walmart wanted to come to town. Brattleboro store owners banded together to protest, fearing their downtown would be decimated by a big-box store. They were successful, and it became a newsworthy tale of a small community fighting off the big "bad" Walmart.
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In recent years, however, I began to notice changes. Several businesses had left, and fewer new stores were taking their place. Sam's closed. The town took on a slightly scruffy feeling, with vacant storefronts boarded up and exuding neglect.
I listened to my parents bemoan how badly Brattleboro had been affected by the opioid crisis. Some stores were vandalized and eventually left or went out of business. Mom noticed more people needing help - homelessness more visible, more people without resources.
Even though my visits have become more frequent as my parents age into their 90s, I don't go downtown as often as I once did. When I do, I feel the change. A general sadness lingers. It no longer carries quite the same Gilmore Girls charm it once had.
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But then, last autumn, my mom mentioned that a longtime friend had asked her to make a tiny rug for a community dollhouse project. The friend, Melany Kahn, had dreamed up the idea of the Festival of Miniatures, inspired by her childhood love of miniatures.
She pitched the idea to merchants, the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance, and local artists as a way to draw people back during the holiday season and reignite business and community spirit.
My mom wasn't sure about making something so tiny. Could she still do it and do it well?
But as she hand-stitched the rugs, she rediscovered she enjoyed being back in her neglected sewing room. At our Christmas visit, she invited us downtown to celebrate the artists who had contributed to the miniature exhibits.
We packed in our cars and drove downtown. We all had trouble finding parking, a situation most unusual. In fact, there were people everywhere. On jammed sidewalks, visitors peered into more than 80 business storefronts (including the vacant ones) that displayed miniature scenes.
The shoe store displayed shoebox homes for hand-knit bunnies; the Co-op displayed juice containers transformed into tiny homes.
Mom's rug was prominently presented in a furnished Victorian dollhouse at Mitchell Giddings Fine Arts alongside hand-blown electrified chandeliers, copper roofing, tiny pottery, original paintings, artisan-made furniture with working drawers, woven carpets, itty-bitty food, metal garden art, and even a glass conservatory with real beveled windows.
She was among 110 local artists who contributed their work in miniature for the dollhouse. It was truly extraordinary.
Our family was completely overwhelmed - by the crowds, by the beauty, by the sheer imagination of it all.
The business community may have begun with skepticism, much like my mom, but they embraced the idea with their creativity and enjoyed sales not seen in decades. Press coverage elevated the town's cultural profile. For many stores, holiday sales were up over 30%.
Brattleboro hadn't seen merchants unite like this, perhaps not since the days they shut out Walmart. It was memorable for everyone and, more importantly, it revived a community that had been drifting in another direction.
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I recently read a powerful book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, by Beth Macy, who grew up poor in Urbana, Ohio, and returned home to discover her community deteriorating economically and politically.
Her story echoes a shared thread of drugs and homelessness which could be any town, anywhere, right now. This was my hometown, too, until the I saw the Festival of Miniatures give everyone a glimpse of what could be.
Creating opportunities that energize people across cultural and political lines takes work. Big solutions to complex problems don't arrive every day.
But sometimes a single strong idea, supported by a willing community, is enough to begin.
It won't solve the drug and homelessness crisis, but it will bring back the locals, and new visitors, to move the economic needle. And by strengthening the economic foundation, the community is stronger and there is greater capacity to support and sustain everyone in our town.
One can hope (as I do) that the positive momentum the festival generated will endure - and perhaps serve as a template for what is possible, not only in Brattleboro, but anywhere there is a need.
I can't wait to come back next Christmas to stroll, shop and reconnect with downtown.
This Voices Essay was submitted to The Commons.
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