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Aggregations of small and “green” businesses are now being formed, such as the new Randall Pond Industrial Park and our rapidly growing Orange Innovation Center. These businesses offer the foundations upon which to create a new economic and social direction to address the requirements of a post-petroleum future.

The downtown business district of Orange is small and consists of a number of small shops on the first floors of buildings close to the traffic lighted intersection of East, West, North and South Main Streets. WJDF, the local radio station is located here, flanked by a yoga and dance studio and a computer store. Trailhead, an outdoor and sports equipment store, is located at the intersection, as is Luanne’s Flower shop and the North Quabbin Woods store. A women’s clothing shop is across the street, south of which is YES (the Young Entrepreneurs Society), a successful youth enterprise incubation center, and the Slencil Pencil factory.

Although the era of large-scale industrial employment in Orange is essentially past, the technical know-how supporting these industries is still present, as expressed through a remarkable number of small businesses located in nooks and crannies around the Town of Orange.

Examples of these include a foundry off South Main Street, a stamping and machining business hidden just to the north of West Main Street, two tiny shops making fishing tackle in North Orange and Tully, a tractor and medium sized equipment repair and machining shop near Lake Mattawa, and any number of other operations located either in garage shops or individual buildings here and there around town.

The Randall Pond Industrial Park is home to Dean’s Beans, the coffee business that literally created the Fair Trade movement. This industrial park also includes Heyes Forest Products, our local sawmill, producing milled locally grown wood products from industrial grade pine and hemlock lumber to fine kiln-dried hardwood lumber. Fred Heyes, the owner, has a lifelong commitment to local forestry, and is personally responsible for the permanent conservation of large areas of local forestland.

The North Quabbin Ecotourism Task Force and Congressman Olver’s Northern Tier Economic Strategies study stressed ecotourism and the creative economy to pump up regional economic development efforts.