For decades, the Totem Bar was where people gathered after long days, where the chatter drifted through the doors like the aroma of old coffee and new beginnings. On June 28, the doors closed for the last time, ending a chapter that had been open longer than most residents have been alive.

Two brothers, Fred and Leonard Angerman, owned the bar for almost half a century of its 76-year history.

Fred died in 2015; Leonard passed in 2021.

Aaron Powell, who owned the bar and liquor store since 2010, speaks with a mix of sentiment that’s common in small towns when a beloved institution disappears: pride for what it meant, and a quiet sorrow for what it costs to keep it going.

“I was burned out more than anything,” Powell said, choosing his words with care. “I think it was a combination of the stress involved with running a business and freight charges that just seemed to keep increasing year after year. Everything together was getting to be too much for me to handle.”

The Totem Bar’s lineage is a tangible thread in the town’s fabric. The business traces back to a string of establishments that first took root on the opposite side of Front Street and moved to the current spot after a 1952 waterfront fire.

Powell bought the venue in May 2010, inheriting a place with a storied past on Front Street, where it had stood since 1949, when Dr. E.J. Wheeler and his wife Dorothy bought Moore’s Bar and renamed it the Totem. They bought the building from Wheeler’s father who ran a drug store and newspaper shop nearby.

Fred and Leonard Angerman ran the bar after purchasing it in 1961 from the Wheelers.

According to Fred Angerman’s son, Jeff Angerman, in 1967 the family expanded the business, transforming the space into a fuller social hub: a larger main bar, a warehouse section, and a dance floor that soon echoed with weekends filled by live music. Local acts — Gary Allen’s band, the Kake Mistakes and Jeanna Paddock, a locally loved one-woman act — added color and rhythm to the town’s nights.

The bar even opened its back rooms for restaurants and other business ventures, a reminder of how interconnected local enterprise can be.

“There was obviously a lot of history with that business,” Powell reflected. “When I first bought the bar, there were regulars who would be ready to come in and have their coffee and pull-tabs at 10 a.m. But that was an aging group at that time, and as time passed they stopped coming in.”

Powell observed a turning point in the business climate after the COVID-19 pandemic. The once-steady cadence of the bar’s patrons began to falter.

“After COVID, it’s like the bar crowd just fell off,” he said. “The older customers stopped coming out as much, and the younger generation is just buying alcohol and drinking at home. It’s just not the same anymore. The liquor store did well; but the bar didn’t.”

Still, Powell sees a silver lining in the ashes of a well-worn establishment: the local economy, when it improves, tends to lift all boats, including those in the hospitality sector. Yet he cautions that changes in the economic tide don’t turn overnight.

As for what comes next for the Totem’s storied building, the town is already looking ahead. A new chapter appears set to begin at the familiar site, as Reme Privett plans to relocate a well-established bar, Rayme’s, into the Totem’s former space, with a tentative move planned for later this month.

“I’m still trying to figure out what to do next,” Powell said, offering a candid glimpse into the limbo that often accompanies transitions in small towns. “I haven’t quite figured that out yet.”

The Totem Bar’s closing marks the end of an era — a space where generations hung their coats, shared stories and found camaraderie in the glow of neon and the clink of glasses. Yet in many ways, the story of that corner is also about continuity: a new business, a fresh face and a community that will likely fill the void with new rituals, new favorite stools and new stories to tell.