Owners of Northwood Cabins in Tupper Lake use friendliness, social media savvy and community involvement to boost their newly purchased lodging
by Tim Nekritz | nekritz@gmail.com
If you’re new to your community after buying an iconic property, there are many ways to introduce yourself or your business.
If you’re Matt Showalter, you decide to be unapologetically yourself, follow your passion and embrace and elevate your community first and foremost.
Showalter and his best friend and blood brother, Chris Davis, purchased Northwood Cabins in Tupper Lake in the Adirondacks a few months ago and his approach that has led to becoming a social media sensation and filling up the cabins is a lesson any community and business owner can learn from.
His popular Facebook posts (under the Northwood Cabins account) first came across my feed thanks to the mysterious Meta algorithm and my first thoughts, in order, were 1) who is this crazy man and what is he doing in my feed?, followed by 2) my goodness, this man is absolutely brilliant!
I somehow was booked to play a Father’s Day brunch at P-2’s Irish Pub in Tupper Lake and owner Michelle Blair offered to put me in touch with Showalter.
He was immediately enthusiastic and friendly and I had three conversations with him in person plus a preview of his renovations of Northwood Cabins, which were about to open at the time in late June.
The cabins are throwback gems with a traditional Adirondack feel, clean mountain air and an owner and staff who will make sure they all have the best time possible.
This goofy (his self-description) genius gave me a generous amount of his time while he was opening cabins in a few days for a business he’s only owned a few months. That tells you everything you need to know about Showalter, who crams a lot into his 14-hour days. But it’s the little details between the running errands, fixing things and preparing to open that captured my attention — and provided helpful examples for businesses, communities and people anywhere and everywhere.
Buying in
A series of happy and hilarious twists and turns led to Matt and Chris buying the cabins.
Tight friends since childhood who have gone through a lot in life, they were looking for their next big adventure when they stumbled across the listing for the cabins while actually looking for something else.
After serving in the military, gaining a background in computers and generally being a people person, Matt had lived many places but, in Tupper Lake, finally found somewhere he could call home.
And if you follow Northwood Cabins on Facebook or Instagram — highly recommended — you can see it.
The first post from Northwood Cabins’ new owners, on March 7, was a simple introduction that made a big splash on social media, as would be expected for a property families have known and loved since 1929.
The follow-ups were perfect, if atypical from a business.
Within days Matt, who had just begun managing the property on site, was posting raves about places like local restaurant Spruce and Hemlock, P-2’s, the nearby Wild Center, Perk and Pine coffeeshop and even Chef Darrell’s Mountain Diner in nearby Blue Mountain Lake.
These soon included the now-familiar selfies of an excited Matt in his green Northwood Cabins cap with local establishments’ employees, customers or even seemingly random people on the street. The engagement rates were impressive and a success story was well under way.
Heck, he even convinced Tupper Lake to join a new pickleball league he founded within his first month. They gather a few times a week in the gym of the Holy Ghost Academy. One gets the impression people spend more time laughing and enjoying each other’s company than actually playing pickleball, but it all falls into Matt’s community-building worldview.
Wins all around
I didn’t take notes or record Matt’s friendly, honest and very funny conversations, thus the lack of direct quotes, but essentially, he kept coming back to the same point: If Tupper Lake wins, everybody connected to it wins.
Matt noted that he rarely posts about his actual business but instead showcases all the other reasons to come to Tupper Lake and the Adirondacks, while also providing glimpses into the community’s character and friendly nature.
In posts, he was wildly enthusiastic (one of his usual states, it seems) to discuss Washboard Donuts, a laundromat that serves (of course) amazing doughnuts. He found out what a redemption center was (not what he expected) and sang the praises of everything happening at Jessie’s Route 3 Redemption. And he quickly became the No. 1 fan of the Tupper Lake Riverpigs baseball team, to name just a few of the attractions he has put over in a big way.
But he also took a calculated risk in perhaps the most popular and wide-reaching post yet, one about Pride Month. It started with a tease that Northwood Cabins doesn’t practice tolerance, before clarifying “because we don’t tolerate people being different from us, we accept it with kindness and compassion.” Matt shared his personal story that, because of his mannerisms and him and Chris seeming like a couple, some people thought he might be gay and how that itself showed him how wonderful Tupper Lake is. As he noted in the post:
“The people who thought I might be gay accepted me.
The people who knew I wasn’t accepted me.
The people who never thought about it one way or the other accepted me.
And that makes me really happy.
Because what it showed me is that most people in this small blue collar Adirondack town honestly didn’t care.
Not in the cold ‘that’s none of my business’ way.
In the warm ‘you’re welcome here, you do you, happy man’ kind of way.”
The post blew up and brought love from all over (and no hateful comments I could find), currently with more than 12.1K reactions (mostly like or love), nearly 700 comments and 566 shares. A lot of people saw the post and many were moved.
Some of them were even moved to action, with Matt saying he got 15 reservations directly from it, but he seemed far happier with providing an emphatic message of inclusion and acceptance than the bookings.
“After all, six million acres is a lot of room. Seems silly to act like there isn’t enough space for people to be themselves,” he wrote in the post. “And if there’s room in the Adirondacks for bears, moose, woodchucks, trolls and Matt from down South, there’s probably room for everybody else too.”
Relevant to every community
You might have read this far and wondered “Why on earth is there a column about a business in Tupper Lake in Oswego County Business Magazine?”
It’s a fair question, but while not everybody can be Matt (well, nobody else could exactly be him), we can all heed his example to elevate our own efforts and our communities.
Matt doesn’t post ugly ChatGPT flyers (which, honestly, all look the same and make me keep scrolling) or things that are irrelevant or IYKYK (if you know, you know) for insiders only.
He wants everybody to know everything about Tupper Lake and it made me even more enthusiastic for my Adirondacks trip, then I spent far more time (and money) in that village than I ever have before. It all stems from his often-entertaining posts and their welcoming and inclusive attitude.
Other businesses in Tupper Lake and around the region have jumped in with similar posts talking about and talking up other businesses. It’s like that scene in “Miracle on 34th Street” where Kris Kringle is in Macy’s and by telling visitors about things they can get in other stores, they become more loyal Macy’s customers.
And if, like Matt, you act like every day is Christmas filled with miracles in your community, who wouldn’t want to visit?
Matt doesn’t do marketing in a conventional sense but, as another business owner and I discussed, is absolutely a brilliant marketer. With brands everywhere yelling “look at me!” and “I’m awesome” and making a harder sell than anybody wants on social media, Matt tells people to look around, points toward everything else that is awesome and makes a convincing soft sell.
It’s not lost on the folks of Tupper Lake either. I mention his name and people’s faces light up. Wherever you are and whatever you do, isn’t that how you want people to think of you instead of being one more nameless, faceless business that posts ugly ChatGPT flyers?
But it’s not about that fame as much as building a community. He’s right — if your community is thriving, more people in it will thrive. He’s out to make people not only visit Tupper Lake but consider moving there. I never would have considered it before, but it’s almost tempting — especially if you spend a few minutes with somebody who would never call himself a salesperson but absolutely sells the place.
Positive posts beget positive results
My first meeting with Matt was typical Tupper Lake: I went to Washboard Donuts and told Tina, the nice lady who runs it, that it was Matt’s fault that I had to check out their (excellent) doughnuts. She chuckled. A mere $1.75 for a doughnut with as many toppings as you want? No wonder he loves the place.
When Matt stopped by shortly after to drop off linens, Tina said his friend, Tim, had just stopped in and he messaged me “Getting donuts huh?” and said I could call or text. Shortly thereafter, we met up at Raquette River Brewing (also a gem) for our first and quickest chat between his errands.
Not surprisingly, he’s somewhat of a local celebrity, recognizable in either the Northwood Cabins cap or a blue one that says, “Matt Loves Tupper Lake.” That love is widely reciprocated although it wasn’t exactly universally instantaneous.
One businessperson told me candidly that an out-of-towner starting a new business in Tupper Lake could, especially in trying times, face an uphill battle. Matt’s disarming enthusiasm, charming goofiness and authentic interest in others won people over, sometimes on first meeting, sometimes after they read his posts or saw him pretty much everywhere enjoying all the place had to offer.
Matt recalls his first (rare) bits of pushback from local residents, but those same people now are very welcoming, share his posts and even pick up his cue to exalt other businesses and aspects of Tupper Lake.
Tupper Lake is a scrappy outpost in the Adirondacks, with a population that dropped when the bottom fell out of the logging business; Census figures say the village lost 16.3% of its residents since 2000, and 18.9% since 1990. It still has its share of people who resist new ideas, newcomers and new ways of thinking, just like almost any community in Upstate New York.
And while many drive through on their way to the ultra-touristy Lake Placid or the charming and homey Saranac Lake, Tupper Lake is a village on the rise.
The village may have declined to less than 3,400 in population, but it also landed the $10 million Downtown Revitalization Initiative in recent years, which we’ve seen help transform the downtowns of Oswego and Fulton.
Grants and tax credits help drive a major investment in commercial, residential and storage facilities at the former Oval Wood Dish Tupper Lake Factory. And more and more people are looking for the more authentic Adirondacks experience that Tupper Lake and its sometimes-rustic experiences — Northwood Cabins included — can offer.
And there’s also the phenomenally successful wooden Trolls exhibit at the Wild Center. One of the great servers at Raquette River Brewing said that 1,500 people visited the exhibit the previous Saturday — which in theory should provide enough people to fill Tupper Lake accommodations many times over, with plenty of room for more rooms.
Having a highly visible and excitable cheerleader for all things Tupper Lake means those visitors were more likely to know about where to eat, places to shop and things to do. And the people working at those destinations, following Matt’s example, are more likely to provide other suggestions and ideas that show Tupper Lake as a welcoming place worth visiting and revisiting.
And that’s true of anybody in any community. A rising tide lifts all boats, whether you’re talking about Tupper Lake or along the shores of Lake Ontario. If you dedicate yourself to being a force for good, as Matt has and any of us can also do, amazing things can happen.
Tim Nekritz is director of communications at SUNY Oswego, where he spearheads telling the stories of the campus community.
