The People’s Emporium features the unique

ELIZABETHTOWN – Nestled in the heart of downtown E-town is a shop that tests the limits of eclectic.

The People’s Emporium is a shop that has everything from dishcloths that never grow sour to handmade woodworking creations that will never wear out.

Emporium. It can mean many things from a center of trade to a store carrying many kinds of merchandise to a grand center of trade as a bazaar. Perhaps Fortune.com best sums up the great trading center of Elizabethtown owned by Dwayne and Mary Miller.

“Those who endure will understand that the key to success, as it was for the great emporiums of old, is building lasting relationships, customer by customer.”

Nailed it. Not only the shop itself, but the way that the Millers treat their customers. One at a time. Like family. A member of their gang.

And it’s true. Once you meet this symbiotic couple, you feel as if you’ve known them all your life.

One a bean counter. The other a creative woodworker. Two opposites that attracted and connected with a single word and together have been a delightful power couple in Bladen County.

How did a very southern boy and a very Cali girl come to form the blessing that is “The Millers,” gracing Elizabethtown with their infectious smiles and childlike pranks.

“I grew up a little bit of everywhere,” Dwayne says in his deep southern drawl. “My dad was a Southern Baptist minister and he had six or seven churches in his career. I was born in Morehead City, North Carolina, and I have also lived in the Virginia and the North Carolina mountains. One of his last churches was here, so this is just where I settled.”

Miller settled hard and though he was in the United States Coast Guard for eight years and then took a turn living out in Colorado, his heart was never from the city he called home in North Carolina.

He makes fun of himself at times to make people laugh. One would wonder if he lived in the prim and proper religion setting all his life, was the breaking out of the stoic a release? Perhaps it’s just that his talent is comedy and his calling is to bring laughter.

If he is the comedic partner in the pair, Mary has no problem being the straight person and trying not to laugh when her husband frames his face with a cornhole board or tells the story of how he’s so old that he remembers silent films, horses and buggies. They entertain each other and he enjoys making her laugh almost as much as she loves her husband that just cracks her up.

It’s a cool love story.

Mary was born on the opposite coast. In Long Beach, California. If you draw a straight line, almost on the same latitude line, there they were. One in a cold ocean (he calls it “her” ocean) and one in a warm ocean which he refers to as “our ocean.”

They were 2,701.6 miles and two years apart. But they both knew that God had a plan for their lives, and they know it had to be something spiritual that brought them together and keeps them together “for such a time as this.”

“I was the youngest of seven,” she said. “My dad was a WWII Pearl Harbor survivor actually.”

Her father was actually stationed on the Arizona and had been transferred in October 1941. He had more to do and children to rear.

When he was 46 years of age, his youngest was born and five years later, he passed away of a heart attack.

After years of working, military and moving from state to state, the couple not yet met were out west. Both in Colorado. Dwayne said he was kinda looking for her although he didn’t know who she was yet and Mary said she was just trying to get out of California.

“I loved the mountains, but I wanted to be in the real mountains, so my two children and I moved to Colorado,” she said.

“Well…” he said with a big pause as if he was wondering whether to release his secrets, but knowing if he didn’t, she would. “It was an online thing. And I hear people all the time saying, ‘aww you gotta be careful with that online stuff.’ You do, but I believe it will be successful as long as you take your time gettin’ to know somebody, watch for the red flags…”

At which point he pauses without looking at her and says, “she had a ton of them, followed by the statement, ‘not one honey, not one.’”

And he waits for her face to crack into a smile.

So, he liked what he saw and knew that he had to wow her with his wit and extended vocabulary.

“I said, I’m going to say ‘hi,’” he said.

And he did. One word. “Hi.”

He was shocked that it took her a month to respond.

“We talked and got to know each other a little bit online,” he said. “We exchanged phone numbers and the rest is history.”

After a while in Colorado, there was a calling to “go back home” for Dwayne, where his parents were and they loaded up the truck and they move to Elizabethtown.”

Mary who has always been somewhat of an entrepreneur and had run businesses before met a man who was up for anything she had a mind to do – and a few years back, they decided to lease with the option to buy the building that they are in now. They named it the People’s Emporium.

One thing that seals the couple and joins them so completely is their faith. They both grew up Southern Baptist, him a pastor’s son and her, a deacon’s daughter. They have never strayed from the beliefs and the relationship that each of them has with God. And to this day they laugh about the PK and the DK.

“One of the things we felt when we opened the store was that this was our mission field,” she said. “This is the place we wanted to have to bring people together. That is the purpose especially of this craft area.”

The sign on the awning out front says, “It’s a store for everything you didn’t know you needed.”

There is truth in advertising.

There are hand-painted local creations, handmade carved wooden treasures, dishcloths from across the ocean, metalwork, cornhole boards and about a million other things that can grab and hold your interest for hours.

“In January 2022 I was listening to an online sermon from Rick Warren,” she said. “He was talking about the different visions that we have. Different dreams. If it’s God-given, it’s going to meet certain criteria. One is going to be glorifying Him. One is going to be that have to depend on Him. It’s going to involve other people and it’s going to involve a lot of faith.”

The Millers know by the unfolding of this dream that they are right on time in the calling to open their shop and to be a ministry to Bladen County. It is still a work in progress and God himself only knows what it’s going to look like when it has come to fruition.

In the meantime, the world inside the Emporium is spinning fast and changes are happening. The dream is coming true for the Millers and their work.

The unique, the eclectic, the things made by the hands of man under the watchful eye of the creator. The shop is divine!