The Dacusville Star

Ten years ago Labor Day Weekend, The Dacusville Star hit the "Newsstands" in our community. 

Jim Shelton holding an issue of The Dacusville Star
and Stuart the Star.

The Dacusville Star was a community based newspaper founded by Jim and Ginger Shelton. Their idea was to create a newspaper that celebrated our community. A newspaper that highlighted our schools, churches, and the great people of Dacusville.  As a member of this community you enjoyed seeing birthday and anniversary celebrations, school and church events, reading about Birds and Bees, Rhonda's Ramblings, Gail's Tails, and the Cure for Kudzu. Do you remember "Stuart the Star" and all his travels? He was born in LA and traveled to Canada, Hawaii, and Yellowstone. He also went on a cruise. Sadly the newspaper came to an end two years later. When asked, Jim Shelton said, "It was bittersweet".

The Dacusville Star done great the first year, it was sold out the first week.  They printed 1200 papers and sold them for 75 cents each. They placed them in schools and businesses around Dacusville.  It went from 43 subscriptions at the beginning to 800 subscriptions in two months. To subscribe to The Dacusville Star it was only twenty dollars a year. Jim and Ginger gave free spaces to churches, schools, and for Birthday, Anniversary, and Wedding announcements. They said their goal was to see each student from the schools in the paper. Jim said that people would stop by his home and hand them birthday notices on napkins right before it went to press and Ginger would take the time to rearrange all the work she had previously done to make sure the announcement was in the next issue. Ginger easily put in 60 hours a week for the paper.  Many people would have long hand written stories and she would have to transfer them to electronic to go to press.

The plate for the 1st issue of The Dacusville Star

The plate for the last issue of The Dacusville Star

Jim said that it wasn't the subscriptions and the sales that kept the newspaper going, it was the big sponsors such as Bank of Travelers Rest, George Coleman Ford, and Kimbrells. In the second year of publication the sponsors begin pulling away from print and using radio and online to market their products. Sponsors paid three hundred dollars for full page ads and without that  revenue coming in Jim said they were losing money to keep printing the newspaper.







Jim said that people still ask him about The Dacusville Star once or twice a month.  He said that even people outside the community that use to live here received copies as far as North Carolina, Georgia, New York, and California. Jim and Ginger was community driven, they once printed 2000 copies and distributed them at the Dacusville Farm Days for free.

The Dacusville Star was short lived, but it lived long enough to get into our hearts.