Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Jamestown has one restaurant. One. And right now the whole town is trying to buy the building it sits in before somebody with deeper pockets does it first.
The place is called the Jamestown Mercantile Café. Everybody up there just calls it The Merc. It sits in an unincorporated pocket of Boulder County that holds somewhere between 250 and 300 people, depending on the day, and it has been the beating center of that town for longer than most of us have been alive.
Here is the thing about a town that small. When there is only one café, one bar, one music venue, one place to grab pizza on a Friday, that one place is not really a business. It is the town. Mayor Michael Box, who has lived in Jamestown almost 15 years and served as mayor for about five of them, calls The Merc the "living room of Jamestown." And honestly, that is the perfect word for it.
The Merc was built somewhere around 1892 to 1896. It made the National Register of Historic Places back in 1989. In the early 1900s it was the town's post office and general store, which tells you it has been the spot where Jamestown gathers for well over a century.
Rainbow Shultz has run the café as chef and owner since 2009. That is about 16 years of feeding this town. She is now a board member of the nonprofit trying to save the place, which matters, because this is not some outside rescue operation. This is the people who actually live it.
And now the important part, the part people keep getting confused about. The business is not for sale. Rainbow's café stays independently owned. What is for sale is the building underneath it. The owner is a guy named Loupee Burton Jr., who most folks know as Burt. Boulder County records show the property last sold in 2019 for $735,000.
So the town organized. Officially they formed a nonprofit with maybe the greatest name I have ever read on a legal document: the Jamestown Home for Wayward Artists, Pirates, and the Somewhat Feral. Out in public they go by something a little simpler. Save the Merc.
The goal is
Burt gave them a runway, at least. He signed a 12 month contract with the nonprofit, an exclusive right to purchase starting May 1, 2026. That gives the group until roughly May 2027 to come up with the money before anyone else gets a shot. A year. For a town of 250 people to raise a million and a half dollars.
You want to understand the stakes? Rewind to 2013.
That year the floods tore through Boulder County and hit Jamestown hard. Roads washed out. Homes gone. And The Merc became the FEMA meeting place, the resource hub, the spot where a broken town figured out how to put itself back together. When the water came, the living room is where everyone went.
Louis Maurer, who actually lives above The Merc, put the economics of it plainly. He says the business is responsible for roughly 20 people's income in that town. Twenty. In a place of 250, that is not a rounding error. That is a chunk of the whole local economy tied to one old building.
The Merc does live music on Wednesdays. Pizza nights on Fridays. It is café, bar, music venue, and community hall all at once. They got the liquor license approved back in the late 1990s. So it is the kind of spot where you show up for a slice and end up staying for three hours because your neighbors are all there.
Now for my favorite detail. The campaign kept its plans quiet on purpose. They sat on it. Why? Because Colorado singer-songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov is connected to the effort, and the group did not want to go public until he "signed on." The worry was that going loud too early would tip off a cash buyer who could just swoop in and end the whole thing before the town even had a chance.
That is small-town strategy right there. Move quiet, line up your heavy hitters, then make noise. The campaign is live now at savethemerc.org.
Look, this is bigger than one café in the foothills. All over Colorado, small towns are watching the places that hold them together get bought up by people who see a building and a return, not a living room. Jamestown is basically running an experiment. Can a town out-organize a checkbook? Can 250 people own their own social heart outright before somebody from somewhere else owns it for them?
They have got until roughly May 2027 to answer that. And the whole state should be paying attention, because Jamestown is not going to be the last town to face this question. It is just the one drawing the line right now.