The Marble Hub: What is it and how did it get here?

A few establishments like the Marble Hub might be scattered around the country, but it’s safe to say there are not many.

Located in the 113-year-old former Marble City State Bank building, the nonprofit Hub is part coffee bar, part book and t-shirt store, which also offers packaged snacks, locally baked goods, trail maps and more. But most of all, the Marble Hub is a community center and place to go for information. Such info includes the fact that Marble doesn’t have a gas station or cell phone service, the road to the Crystal Mill is four-wheel drive only and more.

“The Hub is a simple concept. It’s meant to be a community information center,” Hub founder Charlotte Graham told this reporter.

The idea was born when Graham and her husband, Doug Whitney, moved to the entrance of town, to the old Sneezeweed Gallery, in 1997. “There was no place to go for information,” Graham said. Sometimes, visitors even knocked on peoples’ doors asking questions like. “Where is the Crystal Mill?” and, “Can I use your bathroom?”

At the same time, Graham and Whitney were trying to figure out a way to stay in Marble. “I can’t not be doing something,” she said.

In 1997, the Marble City State Bank building, which community members restored in the 1990s, was sitting vacant after the town council moved its meetings to the newly-built Marble Community Church’s Fellowship Hall across Main Street.

So, Graham’s idea was for a combination coffee bar and community center. Gunnison County owns the Marble City State Bank building, so she contacted the county, and the commissioners gave her the green light to proceed. “Nobody would have done it as a business,” she said. The Hub is now in its 12th year after more than a year of planning.

The Hub got a big boost early on when it received a $25,000 seed-money grant from the Laura J. Musser fund. With money in hand, the board told Graham to go to Costco for shelving and other things to furnish the 500-square-foot space. “I said, ‘We’re going to Construction Junction,’’’ the now defunct second-hand store in Carbondale. “We did it on the cheap, but made it look good.”

One of Graham’s early tasks was to get with local artist Connie Hendrix to create a logo. Graham already had come up with the name and after asking “hundreds of questions,” Hendrix came up with a wagon wheel for the logo. The hub in the middle represents the Hub, while the spokes represent the nonprofits who would volunteer to staff the establishment. “We live in a circle … you have to give back to the community … this is all about the commons.”

The Hub tries to offer as many local items as possible, which includes coffee beans the baristas grind then use for cups of pour-over coffee.

The Hub is administered by a three-member board composed of Graham, Nicole Farrell (also the Hub manager) and Ryan Kenner. At first, the Hub was staffed by volunteers from different nonprofits. At the end of the summer season, after the Hub paid its bills and set aside start-up money for the next year, left-over funds were distributed to the nonprofits. For the past two years, for various reasons, the Hub has gone to using almost all paid employees, although it still has volunteers in the form of two or three 8- to 10-year-old “junior baristas,” some of whom can barely see over the row of pour-over coffee set-ups that compose the bar.

The coffee bar is located in front of the bank’s original walk-in vault, which now doubles as storage space. To the left of the bar are postcards, jewelry, other items and visitor information. To the right is a bookshelf stocked with the works of local authors, or books about the Crystal River Valley, including Charlotte Graham’s own tome: “Memoirs of a River … Up the Crystal,” volumes one and two.

On typical summer days, an on-again-off-again flow of locals and visitors meander through the front door, or just sit at the patio tables in front to connect to the wifi. The Hub also serves as a meeting place for contractors, Gunnison County officials and others to huddle with clients, constituents and friends.

Concluding this interview, Graham reflected and said the Hub just feels good. “The community really needed it … and in this old building there’s so much history. There’s nothing like it.”

The Marble Hub operates through the summer and leaf-changing season and is open daily from 8am to 3:30pm; on Fridays until 7pm with oral histories from 4 to 5pm.

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