South of the Border: Pedro's Kingdom

You have almost certainly seen the billboards. For drivers on Interstate Ninety-Five, they begin in Virginia and multiply steadily southward through the Carolinas, each one featuring a mustachioed cartoon figure named Pedro making puns that range from groan-worthy to genuinely terrible. Pedro says keep going. Pedro says you're getting warm. By the time you cross into South Carolina, Pedro has been promising you something spectacular for more than a hundred miles.

What he is selling is South of the Border, one of the most improbable success stories in American roadside history. It began in January of nineteen fifty, when a local entrepreneur named Alan Schafer bought a patch of land right on the North Carolina-South Carolina line and built a small cinderblock building painted pink. Neighboring Robeson County, North Carolina, had just gone dry, banning the sale of beer. Schafer put a beer depot on the South Carolina side of the line and waited for the customers to come. They came.

By the early nineteen fifties he was selling hot dogs alongside the beer, and making more money from food than from alcohol. In nineteen fifty-four he added a motel. When North Carolina announced in nineteen sixty-four that Interstate Ninety-Five would cross the state line right at his property, Schafer understood what was coming and built accordingly. A ninety-seven-foot neon sign in the shape of Pedro went up. Then the twenty-two-story Sombrero Tower. Then Pedroland amusement park.

When Alan Schafer died in two thousand and one, his roadside beer stand had grown into a three-hundred-fifty-acre complex with five restaurants, fourteen shops, three hundred motel rooms, two fireworks outlets, a campground, and a miniature golf course. Sombrero hats and Pedro statues of every conceivable size filled the gift shops.

High-concept it is not. But South of the Border is genuinely one of a kind, the product of one man's vision, one highway, and one county that really wanted a cold beer.