by Ken Bryson
Photo by Ken Bryson.
When Elizabeth MacKenzie visited Neustadt one afternoon in 2018, she pressed her hands against the glass of the closed library, peering into darkness. “Crickets,” she recalls. The town was quiet and only a few stores were open. Yet something about the village, with its curve of road and historic buildings, whispered possibility.
Today, on a summer Saturday, visitors travel from across the region to take in the town’s shopping and food experiences. The transformation didn’t happen by accident. It happened because people like MacKenzie took a leap of faith.
MacKenzie had moved from Toronto to a country property nearby, looking for studio space to focus on her painting. When a commercial building came up for sale in Neustadt’s tiny downtown, she bought it without a clear plan.
“The atelier hadn’t even been conceived of at that point,” she explains. She set up her studio in the back and started renovating the storefront, thinking about that day she’d wanted to buy a hostess gift in town and was left wanting.
“I could buy honey at the general store, but there was not much else,” she says. Maybe, she thought, she could offset her costs by opening a small gift store; the kind where she would want to shop.
Her first attempt was a holiday season pop-up in November 2018. “I can’t even believe I made a dime, but I did,” she says. People were excited. That response gave her confidence to move forward, and ATELIER 522 was born, named for the French word for artist studio and the building’s address.
Genevieve Smolders arrived in Neustadt from London, drawn by the opportunity to purchase the Diefenbaker House with her husband Jordan. An artist who had always worked from cramped spaces, she found inspiration in the setting. For four years, she ran her jewelry business from home, working in the only small spaces available: a tiny room upstairs, finally a 10-by-10 shed on the property.
Image Courtesy Hen+Bear
When a storefront with exposed brick and hardwood floors came up for lease on the main street, she knew it was time to expand. The Hen+Bear storefront opened in May 2025.
“I was actually very pleasantly surprised at the amount of people coming through town,” she says. “I had no idea about the traffic in the summer.” Working quietly in her shed, she’d had no sense of the cottage-goers, the families passing through, the day-trippers exploring Grey and Bruce counties.
This summer, the visitor traffic increased dramatically after blog TO, Narcity, and Ontario Day Trips featured Neustadt.
“A lot of people that are coming to the shop, they’re like, I saw it online,” Smolders reports. In August, the night market she and her husband organize drew 1,700 people to a village of 400. In June, the couple also organized a summer market in the usually empty Neustadt Lions Park.
The catalyst for much of this energy is the Neustadt Springs Brewery, housed in Ontario’s oldest operating brewery building. When Mike and Anita Weber purchased the business in 2021, they saw beyond the steel tanks.
Photo by Ken Bryson
“There is a history and a story that needs to be told, and people very much enjoy that,” Weber explains. The brewery, which dates to the 1850s, survived prohibition and decades of other uses before returning to its original purpose. Weber credits the community itself as an integral part of the rejuvenation.
The brewery provides a gathering place, and locals have embraced it wholeheartedly.
“We really have tried to make the brewery a comfortable atmosphere where everyone feels welcome and at home,” says Weber. “The people in turn have come and embraced that feeling and made it happen.”
Pat Crocker, who has lived in Neustadt since 2005 and runs Riversong Suites with her husband painter Gary Mclaughlin, sees the transformation clearly.
“I think for us now we have a huge anchor in the village with the brewery and it’s bringing energy and direction and vision,” she observes. The new generation of business owners offers “a uniqueness that only a hands-on proprietor can give.”
The many businesses that now line Mill Street – from gift shops to baked goods, candles to brassieres and antiques – along with the long time businesses such as Granny’s General Store, Noah’s Inn restaurant and Richard Mund Pottery, have revitalized Neustadt into a weekend hotspot for travellers from all over Southern Ontario.
“People aren’t just passing through anymore,” says MacKenzie, “They’re actually making Neustadt a destination.”
Once known as one of Canada’s prettiest villages, Neustadt is working to reclaim that title. The brewery’s Mike Weber envisions it clearly:
“The potential is there, it just needs to be tapped into.”
