A coffee shop in a town with no stoplights.

New Auburn is about 560 people, one highway, and a lot of folks who work for a living. Farms and dairies, cattle and crops. The mill, the rail line, the sand plants, the logging crews, trucking, construction, the shops that build and fix things. People who start early.

If you’ve read Michael Perry’s Population: 485, you already know the place: the volunteer fire department, the neighbors who show up, the way news gets around. It still does. A lot of it now gets around our tables.

The building

208 Old 53rd Street started out in the 1950s as a filling station, back when Highway 53 ran right past the door. Later it became a farm machinery and implement store, where tractors, parts, and a lot of conversations came and went. When we opened the coffee shop, we wanted to keep that feeling: the painted block, the big lettering, the bones of a place built to be useful. If something in here looks like it came off a shop floor, it might have.

The people

Scott and Laurel Connelly came to New Auburn from the Seattle area in 2022, to be near family and to live a different kind of life. It wasn’t a random pick on a map. Laurel’s dad, Jon Pederson, grew up here, and the Pedersons have been in New Auburn for six generations.

They brought Seattle coffee know-how with them: good beans, dialed-in espresso, milk steamed right. But the point was never to bring the city to New Auburn. It was to make the kind of coffee shop that fits here. Unpretentious, a little nerdy about coffee, and always glad to see you.

Scott also works in the beekeeping business, which is why there’s a bee on the sign and Moran Ridge honey on the shelf and in the lattes.

The point of it all

Nobody drives in from Chetek or Rice Lake just for a latte. (Okay, some people do.) Mostly, people come in to see each other. The puzzle table, the name on the board, catching up on whose kid made varsity and whose cows got out. The coffee’s the excuse. The neighbors are the reason.

That’s what this website and app are for too: the Party Line for local news, the weekly games where towns compete for bragging rights, and the name on the board. Same coffee shop, a little more reach.