WILLIAMSBURG — Mary Ellen “Myrt” Edwards Power, who, alongside her husband, Tom Power, was an entrepreneur and force behind some of Williamsburg’s best-known restaurants, died on Sunday, June 15.
Power passed away due to complications with Alzheimer’s, her daughter, Mary Ellen Power, said.
Tom and Mary Ellen, known as Myrt, opened their first business, The Cheese Shop, in 1971 in the Warwick Shopping Center in Newport News. In addition to having a degree in physical education from Mary Washington College, Mary Ellen was a self-taught accountant and entrepreneur. Besides imported cheeses, The Cheese Shop was the first retail business in Virginia to have an ABC license to sell wine, according to her daughter. In 1973, they opened a second location in Williamsburg.
In 1980, the couple partnered with John Curtis and Marcel Desaulniers to open the first New American dining restaurant in Virginia, The Trellis Bar & Grill. They sold their interest in 1994, and the restaurant closed in 2020. An acclaimed James Beard award-winning and nationally-known chef, Desaulniers passed away in June of last year.
In 2003, they opened Fat Canary and The Wine Cellar, while also moving The Cheese Shop to its Duke of Gloucester Street location in Williamsburg. According to her obituary, every year since 2003, Fat Canary has been awarded OpenTable’s Top 100 Best Restaurants in America and AAA’s Four Diamond awards.
Family: Not Just a Business
The couple’s three children — Mary Ellen, Cathy and Thomas — helped out with the businesses while growing up, and all three came back to help out later in life, according to Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen and Thomas have become the full-time managers and owners of The Cheese Shop. Thomas is also the primary owner of The Wine Cellar, The Fat Canary and The Fat Canary Downstairs.
“Family was always the most important thing to her,” daughter Mary Ellen said.
Throughout their lives, the family placed importance on family time, through designated family days on Sundays and frequent family vacations.
According to her daughter, as Myrt’s health decreased, she was comforted and happy anytime she was with family.
“As a family with shared values and common goals, we ended up making, I think, very good decisions together.”
The Last Five Days
Mary Ellen Edwards Power spent her last five days with her loved ones. Just before her passing, she had fallen and broken her hip.
“Being 85 and with Alzheimer’s, traumatic hip replacement surgery is not ideal.” Mary Ellen explained.
The family had to make a hard decision. According to Mary Ellen, choosing surgery could have meant 6-18 months of suffering and deterioration for her mother.
“It’s not what she would want,” she said.
To maintain her comfort through the end of her life, the family decided to have her prescribed medicine, which would keep her comfortable. After one day on the medication, she appeared to be in a deep sleep. She was on the medication for six days.
“On the very last morning, I could tell something was very different.” Mary Ellen said. “The staff took her vitals and suggested that I call my brother and sister. We were all together for the last two hours of her life. She opened her eyes and looked at us individually, and then she looked in the distance, and then she looked at us again, and she took her last breath.”
Between her children, grandchildren and close friends coming to visit in her final days, she was never alone. Mary Ellen said that she felt very lucky to have spent three of those last nights with her mother.
“It was very heartbreaking, but it was beautiful, and I’ll never forget it,” Mary Ellen said.
When Myrt was nine years old, her father passed away. Shortly after her own passing, the family realized it was Father’s Day.
“We realized pretty quickly, wow, how about her? She timed it right again. She gets to see her dad after 76 years of being apart,” Mary Ellen said.
Mary and Tom
Despite both growing up in Norfolk, Tom and Myrt didn’t meet until she was at college at Mary Washington College, now known as the University of Mary Washington, and Tom was in officer training at Quantico for the U.S. Marines.
Myrt’s older brother was a roommate of Tom’s at Spring Hill College, a small private Jesuit college in Mobile, Alabama. Both families had Catholic backgrounds and became very close.
According to Myrt, Tom Power reached out in 1960 to ask her on a date. By 1961, they were married. They were married for 56 years.
“He said, ‘I knew I had to marry her as quickly as possible, because somebody else was gonna get her,’” daughter Mary Ellen said. “He was madly in love with her.”
Tom passed away in 2017 in a swimming accident in Bermuda. Myrt witnessed the tragedy on a public beach.
“Her neurosurgeon believes that that traumatic event triggered Alzheimer’s for her,” Mary Ellen said. “We noticed some changes, but Myrt was still Myrt. She was still the same person that I’ve known my whole life, but about a year ago, the Alzheimer’s really started to take her light away. That was hard.”
Dancing in the Kitchen
Power was a well-rounded athlete. Throughout high school and college, she participated in tennis, snow skiing, water skiing and high court diving, but she was best known for her dancing.
According to her family, she was a great dancer who won competitions throughout high school and college. But it was more than just competitions that she would dance at.
According to Tammy Schumacher and Nicole Weischedel, both employees of The Cheese Shop since their teenage years, Mary Ellen Power would always be dancing, whether at company parties or while slicing bread in the kitchen of The Cheese Shop.
“She was like a second mother to me,” Schumacher said. “She always treated me like family.”
According to Myrt’s family and employees, she was kind and easy to talk to. She and Tom treated all of their employees like family and put special effort into making them feel important.
“Most of my friends when I was a kid wanted to have a mom like mine, and when you’re a kid, you just don’t really know how gosh darn lucky you are,” Mary Ellen said. “She was the most perfect person that I know. I’ve never met anyone like her.”
