BY ROBIN KNEPPER
Kenny and Lora Dotson are forces of nature in Orange County, known for high energy and hard work.
Although Kenny will always take the time to talk, Lora is most often found working. From behind the wheel of a dump truck she had just unloaded recently, Lora explained: “I don’t like to sit idle. I like to work.”
“Lora takes up my slack,” Dotson said. “We work together seven days a week, and we’re trying to instill a hard-work ethic in our children. I refer to her as my right and my left hand.”
They met in Orange County High School when Kenny, now 45, was a senior and Lora, now 43, was a sophomore. After graduation he attended Germanna Community College, earning three degrees. While in college, he worked at a local dairy farm and joined his father in the tile-laying trade.
They married and found jobs in Northern Virginia.
Kenny was successful in the construction business in the fast-growing Tysons Corner and Dulles Airport area, and Lora had a good job with the U.S. Marshals Service. But they got tired of the commute.
“We wanted to be in business for ourselves and start a family,” he said.
Son Josh, 19, will soon start his second year at James Madison University. Daughter Brooke, 16, will be a junior at Orange County High School.
In the mid-1980s, the Dotsons purchased Buddy Padgett’s store at the corner of State Routes 20 and 611. The building is still standing, diagonally across the intersection from the Dotsons’ Locust Grove Town Center.
“It was a country store with boarded-up windows and three gas pumps under a canopy,” Dotson recalled. “Twenty years ago, there was nothing else out here in Locust Grove, and he wasn’t doing any business. I doubt if he was grossing $60 a day. So we bought his inventory and gave him something for his goodwill.
“The first year, we worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week. It was almost worse than working at the dairy,” he added with a laugh.
“Our first employee was my mother, because she worked cheap,” he continued, laughing again. “We added a deli to the store and had videos, but after six or seven years we couldn’t sell any more gas or groceries. We needed to grow.”
The Dotsons bought the land across the road and built the first building of the Locust Grove Town Center. The 16,000-square-foot building includes a 6,400-square-foot convenience store with deli, gas pumps and postal contract station.
“It took us five years to get the first tenant,” he said, “and it was only two years ago that we filled it up.”
The Dotsons built and opened a second building at the Town Center last year. There are now 22 businesses in the two buildings.
The Dotsons plan two more buildings when the economy and market are in the right alignment for expansion.
In the meantime, they are building a road and shepherding the Wilderness Crossing business park through the county approval process.
The proposed business park would dwarf the Town Center. It calls for large retailers at the outer edge of a 900-acre development; restaurants and small retailers in a village-center configuration; convenience retailers such as banks and gas stations; recreational amenities such as lakes, a YMCA and an amphitheater; and hundreds of thousands of square feet of private and government office space.
All this hard work has not gone unnoticed. Last year, the Orange County Chamber of Commerce named Dotson its Business Person of the Year. This year, he won the chamber’s John L. Stanley Award for Excellence for his cumulative contributions to the business community.
“I appreciate what Kenny’s done for Orange County,” Supervisor Lee Frame said, noting that Dotson recently donated space at the Town Center for the Wilderness Food Pantry. “It’s not only his own efforts to get the intersection done, but he’s very community-oriented.”
Robin Knepper: 540/972-5701
rknepper@earthlink.net