MISQUAH — First State Bank of Misquah has a new president for the first time in thirty-one years. Yvette Boone, 48, took over the corner office this week from Howard Lindgren, who retired after three decades behind it, and she arrives by a route that has puzzled and pleased the town in roughly equal measure: she left a bigger job at a bigger bank in the Cities, on purpose, to come here.

Ms. Boone spent two decades in commercial lending in Minneapolis, most recently from an office in Edina, where, she says, she was very good at her work and increasingly unable to remember why she was doing it. “I’d approve a loan for a number with a lot of zeros and never meet the person, never see the thing the money built,” she said. “I wanted to know my customers’ names again. I wanted to lend somebody the money to buy the hardware store and then go buy a hammer there. You cannot do that from Edina.”

She is, by her own cheerful admission, still learning the town — which lake is which, why the stop sign is a sixty-nine-year-old open wound, who Earl is and why his approval seems to carry more weight than the council’s. She has been welcomed warmly and watched closely, in the way a small town watches anyone who arrives meaning to stay, and she is well aware of the watching. “I know I’m the new person,” she said. “I know I’m a few kinds of new person. That’s all right. You earn your way in here the same way you earn it anywhere — slowly, and by showing up, and by being here the next morning too.”

Ms. Boone, who is Black, will be among the more visible new faces in a town that has not had many, and she meets the fact with the same directness she brings to a balance sheet. “Somebody was going to wonder, so I’ll save them the trouble: yes, I’ll stand out here. I’ve stood out before. What I care about is whether, a year from now, I’m the banker who carried somebody through a bad harvest — or just the banker who came from the Cities. That part’s up to me. It’s the only part I find interesting.”

The job is, in truth, a particular one. The president of a small-town bank is expected not merely to manage money but to sponsor the Legion team, sit on the fair board, carry good people through bad years on something close to a handshake, and hold a defensible opinion on pie. Ms. Boone has been briefed on these duties and seems undaunted. “The pie I can handle,” she said. “The handshake loans I’ll have to learn. Howard’s promised to stay reachable, and I intend to reach him often.”

Mr. Lindgren, for his part, pronounced his successor “sharper than I was at her age and a good deal sharper than I am now,” and predicted she would “do just fine, once she learns that around here, the answer to most questions is a story, and the story is usually about a lake.”