Colorado’s oldest business to reopen as a community food co-op – Marketplace

Colorado’s oldest continuously run business is a small general store near the border of New Mexico in the town of San Luis.

The R&R Market opened in 1857. Ownership has been passed down through the same family, generation after generation, until just a couple of years ago. That’s when a local nonprofit purchased the old adobe structure. And with new management comes a new vision and a new name: The San Luis Peoples Market.

The original wall of the market in San Luis is made of exposed earthen bricks that date back 167 years.

“You see those cracks?” asked the store’s new executive director, Devon Peña, during a recent tour. He pointed to scorch marks visible on the bricks from a fire in the 1940s.

“Scratch it and smell the burnt ash,” he said.

Peña is also a college professor in Washington state, though has spent part of the year living in San Luis since the 1980s. A a stocky man, he was wearing a black ball cap that read “San Luis Peoples Market.”

“We got to clean that up so we can plug these holes up, cut the ancient sewage pipes, which are not functional,” he said.

The building has seen better days and needs a lot of work before it can get up and running again. That’s true of much of this little Western town. Many San Luis buildings are in rough shape, market general manager Linnette Ramirez pointed out.

“It feels good to be one of the first buildings brought up to standards now that may continue another 167 years into the future,” she said.

San Luis is Colorado’s oldest town and has a rich agricultural heritage, but the population is shrinking and aging. The last family owners of the market retired in 2022 and had no family who wanted to take over. So, Peña bought the place with the help of about $3 million in grants and private funding. He wants the market to become a community tentpole.

“You can’t sustain a business model unless you become a destination,” Peña said.

The San Luis Peoples Market will be a food co-op with the sort of fare the old market never had, like roasted chicken from a brand-new rotisserie — “because there’s never been one in town and everybody would love one,” Peña said.

And fresh soups with local ingredients, and salad greens and herbs from a greenhouse out back. Also, Ramirez hopes the store’s shelves will be stocked with produce raised by the community, who would share in profits.

“So, if we can get them producing food — even a little bit — that can be sold into the market, then I won’t have to order it from another state,” she said.

It’s a grand vision, but one that requires employees, and working-age people are kind of hard to come by in this remote high desert region.

Peña called it his “next generation problem.”

“That’s the one that’s got us a little bit stumped,” he said. “There’s this demographic gap between 18- and 50-year-olds. They’re not here.”

He’s trying to solve that through paid internships.

Three local high schoolers were washing baskets of produce, working out of another local building until the market reopens this fall. They were learning how to prepare salads and prickly pear cactus ice cream to serve at a community dinner.

“We’ve learned foods I can’t even pronounce, foods I never even heard of,” said 16-year-old Saphira Rael.

They were washing baskets of purslane, a small succulent. Peña and Ramirez have had them growing crops like this from seeds and then making dishes infused with Indigenous and Hispanic tradition. This reporter asked Rael if learning to farm these heritage crops and learning to prepare these culturally rich meals has made her want to stay and be part of the San Luis Peoples market.

“Well, it depends,” Rael said.

As of now, she wants to get out of San Luis and see the world.

“I want to go be a traveling nurse or a flight attendant with my cousin,” she said.

But hey, she has a couple years of high school left. In that time, Peña is hoping a revitalized old market becomes a new centerpiece in town, maybe part of a local farming movement and something worth sticking around for.