From the looks of it, Willey’s Store, with its rambling maze of rooms and modest white clapboard profile, is not the kind of place to expect a binational meeting of the minds.
But this store in Greensboro, in the northernmost part of Vermont, has long attracted customers from Canada who trek there on a quest for their favorite cheeses from nearby Jasper Hill Farm.
Shoulder to shoulder, on a creaking wooden floor worn smooth by 125 years of foot traffic, Canadians and Americans reach eagerly for coveted blocks of Withersbrook Blue, a recent winner at the World Cheese Awards, and rounds of creamy Harbison, its woodsy notes derived from its spruce-bark wrapping.
To these seekers, the border between the two countries scarcely mattered: The cheese was the thing. Its cachet helped make the store, and the town, a destination, lending this remote and rural place an international appeal.
“This cheese has such a cult following, people bring their coolers and stock up,” said Christina Hernandez, the store’s general manager. “They’ll spend a few hundred dollars.”
Since President Trump took office, though, Greensboro, with about 800 residents, has been stung by a collapse in traffic from Canada. Spooked by his threats to make their country the “51st state,” angered by his claims of rampant cross-border drug smuggling and shocked by hefty new tariffs on some of their goods, Canadians have cut back, or suspended, their cross-border travel.
At Willey’s Store, overall sales declined by 33 percent last year, including a $14,000 drop for Jasper Hill cheese, for reasons that included the loss of Canadian business.
And at Hill Farmstead, an award-winning brewery that is another major draw for visitors to Greensboro, things have been no better.
Since last January, Hill Farmstead has sustained a 25 percent to 30 percent hit to its business that is “directly attributable” to damaged relations with Canada under the Trump administration, said Bob Montgomery, director of brand quality at the company.
“Our region has always struggled for an economic engine, and Canadian traffic has been essential,” he said.
Like other small towns in the sparsely populated region, one of the most economically fragile in New England, Greensboro depends on tourists from up north to help fill its lodges, restaurants and shops.
But “the impact is not just economic,” Mr. Montgomery said. In Greensboro, people have grieved two losses: the Canadian customers who help to keep small businesses afloat, and the uncomplicated relationship they long took for granted.
“The damage done is measurable,” Mr. Montgomery said. “It may take a generation to get back to what it was.”
When the antagonism began last February and March, Mr. Montgomery said, “we saw traffic nosedive within a week.” Border crossings into Vermont from Canada declined 30 percent in 2025, compared with 2024, while credit card spending by Canadian visitors fell by half, according to state data.
Some Canadians say they don’t want to boost the U.S. economy. Others feel a new sense of danger at the border, more typically associated with the southern border.
Among them was Emilie Laferriere, a Montrealer who used to visit Vermont often with her wife, an American who grew up there. The couple spent time with family members and camped in Vermont parks every summer. But Ms. Laferriere stayed away after Mr. Trump took office. A visit in December, to celebrate a late Thanksgiving with the in-laws, was the first in Vermont all year.
In part, there was a reluctance to spend money in a country where leaders had been so aggressively antagonistic toward Canada. But there was also a feeling of risk in the United States, both as a Canadian and as an openly gay woman who is half Asian.
“The current opinion in Canada is, the U.S. is a scary place, so don’t go there,” Ms. Laferriere said, savoring a glass of beer by a window with a sweeping view of snowy pines. “I don’t want to support the policies. And I’m not sure if it’s safe or not.”
Support for Mr. Trump is low in Vermont, a famously liberal state that Vice President Kamala Harris won in 2024 by 30 percentage points. In Greensboro, 376 voters cast ballots for Ms. Harris, 75 percent of the total.
But just to the north, where Vermont meets Canada, Mr. Trump won every border town, a complicating factor in the way the region thinks and talks about his toll on the local economy.
Northern Vermont has challenges that predate Mr. Trump’s return to the presidency. Its young people have long fled south to cities with more opportunities, making local jobs hard to fill. At the same time, its housing crisis has worsened dramatically since 2020, when a pandemic-driven surge in out-of-state buyers inflated real estate prices, squeezing out local families and potential workers at Hill Farmstead, Jasper Hill Farm and other businesses.
Layered on top of existing obstacles, the loss of Canadian business has been an especially harsh blow for Jasper Hill Farm. The small cheese maker, founded 22 years ago by two brothers, was rapidly expanding sales of its cheese in Canada when the sudden split between the two countries stopped its growth cold, said Mateo Kehler, a co-founder and the head cheesemaker.
It had already taken a decade to find a way into the Canadian market, where the government closely guards the supply of products, but persistence had begun to pay off, Mr. Kehler said. The farm was on track to make $500,000 in annual Canadian sales, and its owners had believed sales could soon reach seven figures. The collapse of U.S.-Canadian relations abruptly upended that progress.
“In February, it just ended,” Mr. Kehler said. “As in, zero cases ordered.”
Adding to its losses, the business has had to pay tens of thousands of dollars in tariffs on specialized cheese-making equipment it imported last year from Canada and Switzerland. Some replacement parts have doubled in price, he said.
The health of his business matters deeply to the region: Jasper Hill Farm employs 80 people and supplements the milk supply from its own cows with milk it buys from local dairy farmers. It pays them nearly twice the commodity price, a carefully calibrated effort to help support farmers who are also neighbors, in a state that lost hundreds of dairy farms in the last decade.
Tremors from the Canadian shake-up have also been felt at other small Greensboro businesses. At Highland Lodge, a historic inn with cabins on 130 acres, Canadian guests canceled reservations last year, some citing U.S. policies, an innkeeper, Elsa Schultz, said in an email.
There is evidence that some Canadians are coming back. On a weekday in December, bartenders in the Hill Farmstead taproom estimated that as many as a third of the customers were Canadian.
The brewery’s managers said they understood why many others were continuing to stay away.
“We’ve made it abundantly clear that we support their decisions, from a fundamental philosophical place,” Mr. Montgomery said. “And that we hope to see them when they feel they can return.”
Jenna Russell is the lead reporter covering New England for The Times. She is based near Boston.
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