Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 5, 1992 TAG: 9202050027
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY
DATELINE: MEADOWS OF DAN LENGTH: Long
BLESSED WITH SERENDIPITY
It wasn't that long ago when the highlight of Felecia Shelor's day was walking down to the local country store to buy a Sundrop soda.Married and 15 at the time, Shelor lived a meager life in an old farmhouse with no car and no phone. She grew her own vegetables and raised her own pigs and chickens.
At 19, she tried to patch up her bad marriage by having a baby. A year later, she divorced.
Now 29, Felecia Shelor has risen from a life of rural poverty - with nothing but her own work ethic to guide her.
She owns her own country store now, so she can have as many Sundrops as she wants, any time she wants them. Called the Poor Farmers Market, the store is part deli, part grocery store and part gift shop of the postcard and ceramic-frog variety. Located just east of the Blue Ridge Parkway on U.S. 58, it's also become a hub for locals and tourists alike.
"I guess you could say that luck just falls into my life," says Shelor, who's still uncomfortable with the notion of herself as an entrepreneur - let alone a community leader.
"Have you ever heard of serendipity?" she asks modestly.
Indeed, Shelor is a bit too modest as she talks about herself in her office, which is less than two weeks old. The desk space came with Poor Farmers' latest expansion - providing more floor space for the store, plus a bigger parking lot, a porch and a stage for seasonal outdoor jamborees.
Before the office, she did all her paperwork from her bed and her couch. Her kitchen cabinets weren't lined with dishes, but with tax charts.
Shelor may be blessed with serendipity, but she's also been given a fist full of grit to go with it.
As she likes to joke, she was married before she was even allowed to date. Instead of having a social life, she lived off the land and studied schoolwork every spare minute she had.
Something led her to enroll in night business courses at Patrick Henry Community College, paying for it with a federal Pell Grant. She was still in high school then, taking 11th and 12th grade in the same year.
"I think I was being led then," she says. "At 17 years old, I was being prepared for this."
When her marriage failed at 20, Shelor got a job on a nearby farm, picking weeds and planting cabbage alongside migrant workers for $3.25 an hour. She worked hard, supporting herself and her child - and saving enough for a down payment on a $10,000 house on the farm, built for farmhands.
She worked her way up to tractor driver and eventually fell into an agreement with the farmer: She'd buy his produce, then peddle it wholesale to stores and other wholesalers, loading the truck herself.
"At first I thought it'd just be extra money, but it boomed," she says. So she quit the farm in the fall of 1983 and built the first version of Poor Farmers Market - a roadside plywood shack where she sold the farmer's produce to locals and parkway tourists.
That first year, she earned $10,000 - enough to convince her to rent the rundown Gulf filling station across the street when it became vacant in 1984 and to move, with her daughter, Casey, into the house out back. Poor Farmers had a permanent home then, complete with gas pumps and room inside for 10-pound bags of pinto beans, hoop cheese and side meat. "We're basically a country store," Shelor says.
Except that country stores generally don't change year after year the way Shelor's has. "I couldn't afford to pay anyone, so I worked seven days a week and lived on nothing," she recalls, investing all the money she made back into the business.
Now the store has 10 employees, a deli and a gift shop for tourists. Thai cook Noy Pfuntner serves everything from fried rice to fried apple pies and The Hungry Hillbilly - a ham, turkey, cheese, bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.
The store has grown more than 10 times its original size with an average customer base of 500 people daily, half of them parkway travelers. She's also renovated a nearby farmhouse, called Poor Farmers Farmhouse, that she rents out to tourists.
"I don't have a lot of background or knowledge of business principles, but I've got intuition," Shelor says.
In her new office, there's a plaque honoring her as the Patrick County Jaycees Young Business Leader in 1990. Shelor also has served on the local United Way and Chamber of Commerce boards.
A member of the Floyd and Patrick Bicounty Commission, which is studying the development of a tourist attraction at Rocky Knob, Shelor has become a spokeswoman for area tourism.
"Most of the people my age, they've had to move away from the area to make a living," she says. "I see that as a big problem for my daughter's generation."
Tony Giorno, Patrick County commonwealth's attorney, says Shelor's business success stems from her solid knowledge of the community. In return, the community respects her. People there are proud of her, and they know she's not out to turn the bucolic Meadows of Dan into a tourist mecca in the style of Gatlinburg, Tenn.
"She's certainly someone who's recognized her potential and maximizes it," says Giorno, who taught Shelor business law at the community college.
For all her accomplishments, Shelor is still a self-effacing country girl at heart, crediting her staff and her community for her success.
"I think back and it's amazing. I really believe something or somebody is helping me.
"I don't know," she adds more confidently. "Maybe it's just myself."