56 Main Street Has a New Name Again. Down the Road, the Shaker Museum Finally Got Its Land Back.

"For the first time in 96 years, the North Family and the Church Family of the Enfield Shakers will be together again, as one property, just as it had been historically."

Carolyn Smith said that the week her museum closed on 28 acres of hillside along Route 4A. The board president of the Enfield Shaker Museum was talking about a deal that ended nearly a century of separation between two pieces of the same Shaker settlement. The closing happened on September 29, 2023. Three years on, this is the first fall where the museum's calendar has actually caught up to the size of the land it now owns.

At the same time, a few minutes away in Enfield Village, the building at 56 Main Street has a new name for the third time in a decade. Neither story made much noise on its own. Together they say something about how this town holds onto its land, and what it takes to actually use it once you have it back.

Three Names, One Address

The number hasn't changed. The name has, twice.

56 Main Street sits inside the Copeland Block, the only brick commercial building in Enfield. Ira Copeland put it up for about $10,000 in the final years of his life, after he'd moved into town following his wife's death in 1897. The block has held a drugstore, a millinery shop, offices, and an Odd Fellows meeting hall upstairs since then. It sits on the bank of the Mascoma River, right where the river cuts through the village on its way to the lake.

More recently the ground floor was Kitchen 56, then 56 Main Street Bar and Grill, and this year it became Brick & Barrel, registered as a trade name with the state on February 26, 2026, and open by Mother's Day serving brunch, burgers, and steaks out of the same storefront. The menu changed, the staff changed, the sign changed. The address on the deed and the tax rolls stayed exactly the same.

That's not a story about a restaurant closing or a restaurant failing. It's the normal churn of a small commercial block that's been changing hands for over a century, in a building whose value was never really about who was behind the bar. The building outlasts what's inside it. That's the pattern at 56 Main, and it's worth holding onto, because the second story in Enfield this fall is about a piece of land that took the opposite route: it kept its identity the entire time, and it just took 96 years to get the deed to match.

The Land That Took a Century to Come Back

In 1923, the Shakers who lived on the western shore of Mascoma Lake put 1,100 acres and 70 buildings up for sale. A New York sporting club offered them $100,000. They turned it down and sold to the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette for $25,000 in 1927 instead, because they cared more about who'd keep the land's spiritual character than about who'd pay the most for it.

The La Salettes ran a seminary and religious retreats out of the buildings for decades, including the North Family complex directly across Route 4A from what eventually became the Enfield Shaker Museum. The order also built the Mary Keane Chapel and ran a Marian shrine on the hillside, known locally for its Festival of Lights each December. By 2020, with the number of La Salette priests and brothers in the United States down to 82, most over 70 years old, the order announced it would close the Enfield shrine.

The Enfield Shaker Museum had negotiated right of first refusal on the property years earlier, and it took that option. The museum closed on the 28-acre shrine parcel for $1.5 million in September 2023, the first phase of a $3 million campaign that also covers repairs to the property over the following three to five years. The purchase brought over five original Shaker buildings back into the museum's hands, including the Trustees' Office and two barns, plus two structures the La Salettes had built. Longtime selectboard member John Kluge called it the best possible use of the property at the time.

The hillside itself, with its stations of the cross and rosary walk, stays as it was. Smith said keeping that ground open was part of the point: when the Shakers lived there, that same hillside was mostly pasture, and letting it stay open land is consistent with what the museum was already trying to protect.

What the Bigger Footprint Actually Changed

Here's the part that doesn't show up in a closing announcement. Owning the land and having something to do with it are two different timelines.

A museum can close on a deed in an afternoon. Restoring buildings, training guides, and building a program that actually fills that acreage takes years. This fall is the first one where that catch-up shows.

The museum's Writer's Retreat Weekend runs October 2 through 4, set on the grounds the acquisition brought in. A Taboo Tour, billed as a look at the darker side of Shaker life, has been running dates through October 30. Through the summer the museum also ran a weekly Saturday herb garden tour led by Lisa Torres, a museum interpreter who spent 31 years teaching science at Lebanon High School before joining the staff, walking visitors through beds of culinary, medicinal, and dye plants the Shakers once grew for their own herb business. None of that programming needed the La Salette parcel specifically, but the museum now has more ground, more buildings, and more staff hours to spread a season of events across than it did three years ago, and the fall calendar reflects it.

Where the Town's 250th Fits

Enfield was chartered in 1761, and the town's America 250 programming has been running through 2026 to mark the country's semiquincentennial. When the Enfield Shaker Museum kicked off its 2026 free outdoor concert series on July 1, it did so explicitly in conjunction with Enfield's 250th, with the Upper Valley Community Band playing patriotic and band music favorites outside the historic Stone Machine Shop.

That's a small detail with a clear implication. When the town needed a stage for its own anniversary year, it picked the reunified museum grounds, not a storefront on Main Street. The building at 56 Main will likely have a fourth name at some point. The hillside across from the Great Stone Dwelling just spent a century getting back to where it started, and the town chose that ground to mark its own 250 years.

The Pattern

Main Street changes because commercial space is supposed to change. Someone leases it, runs a restaurant, moves on, and someone else takes the space and tries something different. The Copeland Block has done that for well over a century and it'll keep doing it. The Shaker Museum's hillside is the opposite kind of story. It sat under other names and other uses for 96 years and then went back to exactly what it was before, right down to the acreage.

Both things are happening in Enfield this fall, a few minutes apart. One is routine. The other took nearly a century.

If you're already living near Mascoma Lake and want more of what's actually changing in Enfield, LIVE UV LIFE keeps tabs on the village and the museum grounds year-round, not just when someone's ready to make a move. You can browse more of what's here in the Enfield neighborhood guide.