ABOVE: Customers enjoy coffee and culture on a Friday afternoon.
Grounded in Place Pomeroy’s River Roasters more than a coffee shop
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STORY BY MAGGIE CAMPBELL // PHOTOS BY COURTNEY PERRETT
n a July morning in 2014, Larry and Candice Hess walked around downtown Pomeroy waiting for one of the city’s iconic music festivals to start. While looking at a building on the riverfront, the couple daydreamed of a coffee shop that would complement a morning beside the beauty of the river, live music and community. Almost a year later, they purchased that exact building and started their three-year renovation to make River Roasters Coffee Company a reality. Before the café had even opened, business owners and other community members were stopping in daily to check the progress of the renovations. These budding relationships benefited the couple when a flood set back their progress in February 2018. River Roasters was two years into its renovations. They were ready to focus on the upstairs, which they were going to make their home—then the Ohio River crested around 50 feet. The flood put nearly all of their work to waste. The couple had to rethink basic construction to make sure that they would be able to recover if another flood hit. “We were in a spot that was actually beneficial for us to see what a flood looked like, if that makes sense
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at all,” Larry says. The couple also got to see how the community recovered from a flood. “[Community members] didn’t ask who we were or where we were from,”
