Ask a cyclist riding the Paul Bunyan State Trail where to get coffee in Laporte and most of them won't know there's an answer. The Door Coffeehouse sits about a block off the pavement, tucked into a town so small that finding it requires either a local tip or dumb luck. Riders who've stumbled onto it describe hunting for a sign that never appears, then later learning the city wouldn't allow one along the trail corridor.
That single detail tells you more about how Laporte works than any population count could. This is a town of roughly 150 people that has kept a working Main Street alive for decades, and it hasn't done that by chasing foot traffic. It's done it by quietly building its handful of businesses around a very specific kind of customer: someone pedaling through on a 115-mile trail, thirty miles from the nearest grocery aisle in either direction.
The Smallest City on the Longest Trail
The Paul Bunyan State Trail is the longest continuously paved rail-trail in the country, running from Crow Wing State Park near Brainerd up to Lake Bemidji. Laporte is the smallest incorporated city anywhere along that route, and it earns a specific designation from riders for exactly that reason: a dedicated rest area, a gas station convenience store, and a grocery store that exists mainly to keep cyclists fed on a stretch with almost nowhere else to stock up.
That grocery store, Laporte Grocery & Meat at 20 Main St E, isn't a tourist novelty. It's open seven days a week, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and Saturdays, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays, and it carries a 4.6-star rating across more than 170 reviews. In a town this size, a rating like that isn't a marketing accomplishment. It's closer to a survival metric. If the one grocery store in Laporte didn't work for both the 150 people who live here and the riders who pass through every summer, it wouldn't exist at all.
That's the pattern worth noticing before anything else. Laporte's businesses aren't scaled to the town's population. They're scaled to the trail's traffic, with the town's own residents as the people who keep the lights on the other eleven months of the year when the trail traffic thins out.
The Patio Faces the Trail, Not the Highway
Popple Bar & Grill makes the same bet in a different way. It sits directly across from the trail, and its outdoor patio looks out over the lake rather than toward the road. Reviewers who've stopped there mid-ride describe it as a natural break point, the kind of place you find because you're already standing at the trailhead and it's right there.
That orientation is a choice, not an accident. A bar and grill in a town of 150 people doesn't need a patio built for passersby unless passersby are the customer base it's actually built for. Locals eat there too, but the physical layout of the place answers to the trail first.
The Door Coffeehouse takes that logic one step further by removing itself from the trail's sightline entirely. Instead of positioning for maximum visibility, it sits a block back with no signage pointing the way. The people who find it are the ones who ask, and the ones who ask tend to already know Laporte is worth a stop, which means the coffeehouse never has to compete for attention with whatever's visible from the pavement. It's a filter, whether or not that was the intent.
What Keeps Running When the Trail Goes Quiet
None of this explains what Laporte does the other nine months of the year, when the trail traffic drops off and the town is just a town again. That answer sits with the institutions that never needed cyclists in the first place.
- The Guthrie Community Center, a few miles from Laporte, hosts a corn feed and craft fair every August that draws people from around the area, trail season or not.
- The Northwoods Writers Group meets on the second and fourth Monday of every month at Lakeport Township Hall on County 39, a standing appointment that has nothing to do with tourism.
- The Laporte American Legion Auxiliary runs an Irish and American Soup Festival and bake sale each March, timed for exactly the part of the calendar when no one is riding a bike anywhere near this town.
- Garfield Lake, one of four public beaches maintained by Hubbard County Parks and Recreation, also hosts the Garfield Lake Ice Racers, whose season runs through winter and wraps with a final race in early spring.
None of these are trail-adjacent. They're the calendar Laporte keeps for itself, independent of whatever's happening on the pavement two blocks over. A soup festival in March and a corn feed in August aren't competing for the same customer as Popple Bar & Grill's summer patio crowd. They're proof that the town has its own rhythm underneath the trail's rhythm, and that the second one doesn't collapse when the first one goes quiet for the winter.
Two Main Streets in One
Put those two patterns next to each other and the real shape of Laporte comes into focus. Most towns this size don't have a functioning commercial strip at all. The ones that do usually have one clear reason: a highway interchange, a lake with resort traffic, a industry anchor. Laporte's reason is a paved trail that happens to run straight through the middle of it, positioning a town of about 150 people as an essential stop between Walker and Bemidji.
But the trail alone wouldn't be enough. Seasonal traffic through a town with nothing underneath it produces seasonal businesses that shutter every October. Laporte's Main Street survives the off season because the same buildings that serve cyclists in July are serving Legion Auxiliary members in March and craft fair vendors in August. The grocery store's four-figure review count and the coffeehouse's word-of-mouth-only existence aren't two separate stories. They're the same story told from two angles: a Main Street that answers to the trail during riding season and to its own residents the rest of the year, without needing either one to carry the whole load alone.
That's not a detail you'll find on a generic "things to do in Laporte" list, because it isn't really a to-do item. It's closer to an explanation for why the town still has a Main Street at all, which is the kind of thing you only notice once you've lived here long enough to watch both calendars run at once.
If you're already living that rhythm and thinking about what your Laporte property is worth, or if you're weighing whether this stretch of the Paul Bunyan Trail is the right fit for your next move, Team Cermak knows this corridor block by block. Get in touch for a free home valuation or take a closer look at what's happening in Laporte right now.
