Over the past couple of years, Hatchet Coffee has become an essential stop for me whenever I visit my family in the mountains of North Carolina. I grew up in Watauga County and didn’t really become a coffee drinker until I moved to the Triangle and discovered beans that weren’t dark roasted or artificially flavored. On visits home, I’d resigned myself to K cups until I tried Hatchet for the first time.   

I was surprised to find Hatchet in a small business park off Bamboo Road. I lived the first five years of my life in the trailer park that’s now just a couple minutes’ walk from the shop. Hatchet’s initial location was tucked into a space shared with Center 45, a climbing gym. Both businesses have since expanded in the same area. There’s also now a tattoo studio and, prior to COVID, regular food trucks and pop-up markets. Their neighbors also include a rock quarry, homeless shelter, food pantry, and, until last summer, a methadone clinic. When I lived in Boone, that road had been mostly a cut through for drivers looking to avoid town traffic by going over Wilson’s Ridge.  

I’m not unaccustomed to change in my hometown. Since moving away, each visit I seem to notice a new student apartment complex or chain restaurant that’s sprung up in the last ten years. There’s even a Starbucks, which for years had divided residents who either desperately wanted it or who believed it would destroy what little local coffee we had in Espresso News or Higher Grounds. Living and working in Durham though taught me that a coffee shop or a brewery in a neighborhood once labeled sketchy usually meant that the folks who’d been living there were about to see a lot of new neighbors and higher rents or taxes. It turns out this area has both a coffee shop and a brewery and a new name: East Boone. (Check out a map of East Boone here)

An article in the Watauga Democrat reporting on the relocation of Booneshine Brewing Company to the Industrial Park area quotes co-owner Tim Herdklotz as saying “‘There are some exciting things going on in this side of town. Hatchet Coffee, Center 45, are happening in this area, so we’ve kind of partnered with those guys and started to call this part of town ‘East Boone.’” In December 2018, Herdklotz was also quoted in the High Country Press saying, “‘We think this is the direction that the town almost has to grow. The town is going to be moving some of their offices out here, we’ve got the soccer fields right next to where we are, Rocky Knob mountain biking park, we feel great about this side of town. As it grows, we’re happy to be here.’” Listings on AirBnB and Zillow cite their locations in East Boone as a perk. In the latter part of 2019, the name seemed to become more official, partly through the efforts of Harmony Lanes, an advocacy group for multi-modal transportation in Boone. The group proposed the East Boone Connector project to the NC Department of Transportation, which would provide a protected bike and pedestrian path along Bamboo Road from 421 to Wilson Ridge Road. The project was approved by NCDOT, which will pay for the connector as part of future plans to widen the road. The state government’s adoption of this name for the project suggests that though the name East Boone grew out of a marketing campaign, it will become more officially ingrained in the material culture of the area.

East Boone isn’t the first new name given to this area. Hatchet Coffee sits on land that once belonged to the Cherokee, land that was then named after the type of folk hero Americans like to use to make colonization seem adventurous and romantic rather than violent in ways that are still felt hundreds of years later. Human migration, violence, evolution, misunderstanding—any number of factors shape the names we give places or things. As for Hatchet itself, owner Jeremy Parnell said to Sprudge they wanted to choose a name that reflected love for Boone’s natural surroundings, that they “wanted a symbol that would be easily recognizable and relatable to those who also love the outdoors.” The name roots itself in the romanticized outdoor adventure culture of Boone – a culture that sometimes excludes people who don’t have the ideal gear or bodies to participate.

To carry that a step further: consider the geisha versus gesha debate. In her article for Sprudge, Jenn Chen cited potential reasons for the change in name as a simple misspelling, a romanization of a word from Kafa, or a deliberate choice to use a more familiar, exotic word for marketing purposes. Regardless of the origins of the change in spelling, the specialty coffee industry fetishizes this coffee using a name that carries a heavy weight of orientalism and colonialism. 

The discovery of East Boone won’t change the world. Not even the world of coffee. The name gave a good laugh to other folks I mentioned it to, who are accustomed to the town vs university vs local dynamics, where anyone whose grandparents didn’t live in the area can never really gain the clout of being a “local.” But what will the discovery of East Boone do to people who were already struggling to afford rent or property taxes?

Hatchet Coffee draws me in for a lot of reasons. Most importantly, their coffee is good, but they do a lot of other things I really admire in shops:

• Creative yet unpretentious menu. So many shops seem a little too try hard with their menus, trying to shoehorn espresso into their take on a perfectly good cocktail or crafting a recipe-blog-length Instagram story about something that is essentially a latte with syrup. Hatchet consistently puts out seasonal menus that offer both classics and surprising new combinations that are delicious and have a sense of fun and whimsy that’s often missing in coffee. 
• Excellent service. I once brought home a bag of coffee from Hatchet that I found a pebble in (before dumping it in the grinder, fortunately). When I brought it to their attention, they not only replaced the coffee, they mailed me two other bags (including a Costa Rican gesha), stickers, and a camp mug, along with a personalized note. 
• Welcoming space (again, prior to COVID). Plenty of comfortable seats, work tables, and parking make for an easier place to spend time than other shops in the area. 

Hatchet has been a completely positive addition to my visits to Boone. But what if I were still living in that trailer park? Would I feel as welcome? Would I be able to afford anything at one of the few businesses within walking distance of my home? At its core, the question here becomes one of what a business owes its neighbors, where its wealth goes, and whether those in possession of capital are the ultimate arbiters of how communities grow and who they include.

In Durham, my second home, we’ve seen this play out in pernicious fashion this past week with East Durham Bake Shop in the news. The owners of the business, who had a successful Kickstarter campaign rooted in assertions of service to the community, have been accused of creating a toxic environment of racism and transphobia for employees. Furthermore, they’ve been accused of policing who is allowed to use their suspended coffee system (where someone can purchase a drink or food for a stranger), asking homeless people to leave if they’re not making purchases (when other non-paying guests are allowed to stay), and targeting Black people with extra surveillance (even going so far as to take special cleaning measures after Black customers vacate their tables.) While their actions are atrocious by any measure, it seems even more egregious when considering that they were among the first white gentrifiers to Columbus the neighborhood and had recently made a show of supporting Bakers Against Racism.

I believe that Hatchet and other East Boone businesses mean to have the community’s best interests at heart, and I don’t expect anything as exceptionally toxic as the East Durham example is happening. But, like me living and working in Durham, they bring their lives and work into a context in Boone they might not be fully understanding, even if like me they love their chosen home the best way they know how. As 2020 challenges us to examine what the future of our communities and businesses look like, I think it’s important to be mindful that good intentions don’t necessarily mean good outcomes. Creating a new community in a new place doesn’t mean you start with a blank slate.