The Southern Highland Reader

SYLVA–The lauded expansion of Sylva’s Jackson Paper Manufacturing Company has come to a halt.

Stonewall Packaging, LLC, launched in spring of 2009, has announced it will close its doors.

The century old Jackson Paper plant that dominates downtown Sylva is not affected by the closing — Stonewall Packaging, located in a renovated facility further out Scotts Creek, will close, eliminating 43 jobs.

Jackson Paper makes corrugating medium — the zig-zag paper inside the walls of cardboard. Stonewall Packaging used the medium to produce complete cardboard.

Company representatives say that a major purchaser of their product backed out, leaving them no choice but to close.

More here from the Asheville Citizen-Times.

Diners crowd Guadalupé Café during A Taste of Downtown Sylva 2009

SYLVA–The Downtown Sylva Association has announced the lineup for its annual Taste of Downtown Sylva culinary walking tour.

The tour, set for June 26, features the following restaurants: Papou’s Wine Shop and Bar, Lulu’s on Main, Signature Brew Coffee Company, Eric’s Fresh Fish Market, Bill’s Back Street Take-Out, Spring St. Café, Restaurant 553, My Place, Ironstone Grill, Heinzelmannchen Brewery, Annie’s Naturally Bakery, and Mill and Main.

Ticket availability is limited.

Tickets can be pre-purchased for $15 (adults) and $7 (youth ages 12 and under) and will be available at participating merchants starting June 4th. Tickets may also be purchased at these downtown events: Sylva After Dark on Main Street on June 4th and Concerts on the Creek at the Bridge Park on June 11th (cash or check only).

Remaining tickets, if available, will be sold the day of the event beginning at 1pm next to Signature Brew Coffee Company and at Papou’s Wine Shop and Bar.

All proceeds benefit the Downtown Sylva Association.

Taste of Downtown Sylva ticket holders may enter drawings during the tour to win gift certificates from participating merchants.

Every town worth its grinds needs a coffee magnate, and now Sylva has one.

John Bubacz, owner of Signature Brew Coffee Company and Bubacz’s Underground on Main Street has purchased the competition — Shot in the Dark Cafe — from Lucy Silverman and Justin Goble.

Silverman and Goble were recently married, and she has taken work in Durham. Goble’s departure will be felt on both ends of Main Street, as he is also a workhorse reporter for the Sylva Herald newspaper.

Bubacz, who roasts his own joe at Signature Brew, will reopen Thursday, January 21.

“I’ll move my coffee roaster up there in due time,” says Bubacz, “but we’ll immediately offer fresh pastries, organic fair trade coffee and espresso, snacks and grab-and-go lunch. We will be open 7am-6pm Monday-Thursday with weekend hours TBA.”

Bubacz opened Wha Cha Want Bodega on the WCU campus in 2001, and combined that business with Sylva’s Juice Junkie in 2002. He moved the whole shebang to its current location at the Underground in 2006.

Once, about ten years ago, I was having lunch at a Sylva restaurant called the Spring Street Cafe.

From my table I caught a quick glimpse down an unlikely sightline — framed just so by some plants and interior drapes, down a hallway, and through a cracked door — of a baker’s table. On the table was a wedding cake, and the cake was being carefully decorated by two hands. The hands were all I could see.

The owner of those baker’s hands would one day become my wife, and we would come to own a house across the street from the cafe, where we live today with our three girls.

Spring Street, which has been closed for nearly a year, will soon open again under the ownership of former employee Emily Elders, a Cullowhee native. One of her ideas for an advertisement is a group shot of kids that have sprung from the many friends that have surrounded the cafe for the past ten years. (It better be a big ad).

All along, Spring Street Cafe has held a particular niche in Sylva’s lively-for-a-small-town restaurant scene.

First, in the nineties, it was City Lights Cafe, a small eatery attached to the bookstore upstairs, and under the proprietorship of Joyce and Allen Moore.

About a decade ago it was expanded into it’s full service self by Faye Holliday, whose culinary flair traces at least a little of its lineage to Asheville’s Hector Diaz, owner of the eclectic and popular eateries Salsa’s, Zambra and others.

Holliday and her unusually loyal (for food service) crew built a strong following through wild explorations of fresh local and world cuisines, and Tuesday night old time jam sessions and Sunday brunches were de rigueur among a certain Sylva social set.

Faye’s slow food influence can now be felt in a number of kitchens in the southern mountains.

Holliday sold the place to Lisa Agee a few years back, and Agee, whose desserts were quite a calling card, closed her business last spring, a victim of the economic malaise.

Enter Ms. Elders. As a single mom, a student and director of the Jackson County Greenways Project, you’d think she might have enough on her plate to worry about what’s on everybody else’s, but she’s game. She and a band of volunteers have been sprucing the place up in preparation for a January 26 opening.

“I’m very much inspired by Faye’s ideals,” Elders says. “We’ll be as local and as organic as we can be. My goal right away is to keep price points down, and bring back a lot of the items people remember and love.”

Elders has assembled a crew of former employees and a front-of-the-house manager that’ll be familiar to Sylva folks: Michael Redmon has been a longtime employee of Annie’s Bakery.

Several of the specifics that fans of the place remember will return, sushi Wednesdays and Sunday brunch among them. In addition, Elders and new City Lights Bookstore owner Chris Wilcox hope to develop a more symbiotic relationship than the two businesses have shared before. The cafe’s hours will be much closer to those of the bookstore, and the bookstore will open on Sunday afternoons.

Spring Street will hit the ground running, events-wise. Elders will host a Chamber of Commerce business after hours on January 28th, and will open for business the next day.

Book-signings and an art opening are already on the schedule for February.

SYLVA–City Lights Bookstore, a retail anchor in downtown Sylva since the early eighties, is changing hands.

Owners Joyce and Allen Moore are selling the store to longtime employee Chris Wilcox, effective January 1.

Moore informed her customers of the change in a letter written on Monday, in which she wrote, in part:

As I begin my 66th year and a new decade, I feel the need to slow and simplify my own life, but I believe that I am leaving the store in capable hands, well suited to dealing with the evolving complexities of the bookselling world.

The Moores bought the store from local author Gary Carden in 1986, and moved it from Main Street to its current location at the corner of Spring St. and East Jackson St. a few years later.

In her letter, Moore also wrote:

Chris and his employees will also be facing many changes.  Some are beginning to affect not only the face of the bookselling world, but even the book itself.  It will take hard work, a constant acquisition of new information, flexibility and most of all, your continuing support to carry City Lights into the new decade.

Many independent bookstores across the country are closing in these economic hard times, but you have continued to say with your dollars that having a real bookstore in Sylva is important to you.  It is essential that you continue that commitment, not only to City Lights, but to all the independent businesses in downtown Sylva.

STATEWIDE–Brian Postelle at the Mountain Xpress has a look at statewide smoking regulations that go into effect in early January, and he focuses on the fact that municipalities will have expanded powers to restrict smoking in outside areas.

It’s an obvious subject in Asheville, where hipsters congregate and smoke in lots of places.

Here’s an excerpt from Postelle’s story:

… unlike enclosed bars and restaurants, where secondhand smoke fills whole rooms, some maintain that outdoor areas do not pose as clear a danger.

“We’re outside. Why wouldn’t we be allowed to smoke?” asks Aerin Moonbourne after lighting up with friends at [Pritchard Park].

[Patrick] Mullen, though, points to mounting evidence of secondhand smoke danger. “I don’t think that it’s any question anymore that it’s a health issue,” he countered. The air in the park, he maintains, is “pretty cloudy most of the time, and there’s cigarette butts all over.”

But Gabriel McKinney, also enjoying a smoke at the park, believes there’s a larger agenda lurking behind the ban. “They do this every year,” he asserts. “It’s just digging up dirt to push the homeless out.”

Read the piece here.

SYLVA–The holidays are here and so is the spirit of giving!

The Downtown Sylva Association is partnering with The Community Table for a Food Drive from December 1st-23st. Visit some of your favorite downtown hotspots to make a donation that will make a difference at the same time.

Papou’s Wine Shop & Bar, Annie’s Bakery, Yesterday’s Tree, Lulu’s on Main, Friends of the Library, Jackson County Chamber of Commerce, Bubacz’s Underground, Heinzelmannchen Brewery will have a box identified for your donation at their location.

Check our website, www.downtownsylva.org, as this list of merchants will grow in the coming days.

New life for the old post office

It’s hard to think of much that would bring more life to a quiet building than a dance academy, and that’s just what’s coming to Sylva’s old post office, located on Landis St., and closed since spring.

Triple Threat Performing Arts Academy is moving from its current location adjacent NAPA Auto Parts on the Asheville Highway into the old post office. Renovations there are ongoing, and owner Valerie Tissue hopes to crank up in March. Downtown merchants will take note; the academy has over 230 students, whose parents and assorted caretakers have a lot of time on their hands between drop-off and pick-up.

Spring St. Cafe to reopen

Spring St. Cafe would celebrate its ten-year anniversary in March — if it were open. And apparently it might be, as owner Faye Holliday and space-owners Joyce and Allen Moore are close to reaching terms with an interested party …

Downtown wayfinding system

Downtown merchants — particularly the ones who aren’t directly on Main St. — have long complained about the lack of a standardized signage system for the downtown area. Many have resorted to various sandwich boards placed here and there, bringing about the occasional visit from the sign ordinance folks. Town Manager Adrienne Isenhour has been working this year to implement the needed system, and her efforts got a boost this week with a $9,000 municipal grant from county government.

Downtown Sylva Association; another successful parade

From the DSA: Downtown Sylva celebrated its annual Christmas parade Saturday with a great turn out and amazing floats that showed the time, effort, and talent that went into making such a special presentation. Wilmot Baptist Church won “Best in Show” and $200.  Honorable mention was a tie and goes to Yesterday’s Tree and Heritage Christian Academy.

SYLVA–Sylva town leaders, in a unanimous vote, have named former Economic Development Commission board member Chris Matheson to fill an empty seat on their board.

The vote at Thursday’s meeting filled the seat vacated by newly-elected mayor Maurice Moody.

The naming of Moody’s replacement had been the focus of speculation, because on the frequently ideologically divided board Moody often provided the “swing” vote.

Thursday night’s proceeding before a packed house was the final meeting for Sylva’s longtime mayor, Brenda Oliver. Oliver has served as mayor since 1991, and was a town board member for a decade prior to that.

The meeting was also the last for board member Harold Hensley, who was unseated in recent elections. Hensley was replaced by Danny Allen, a previous board member who won re-election. Also sworn in was incumbent Stacy Knotts. Knotts and Allen were the top vote-getters among five candidates for two seats on the board.

Some, including the newspaper The Sylva Herald, had argued that Hensley, as the third-highest vote-getter in the November elections, should’ve been appointed to fill Moody’s seat.

Coverage from the Smoky Mountain News here.

Coverage from the Sylva Herald here. (Link expires in one week)

DILLSBORO–Dillsboro invites folks to experience Christmas spirit in early December as this walkabout mountain town glows in holiday splendor for the 26th annual Dillsboro Festival of Lights & Luminaries.

The four-night festival, which takes place Dec. 4-5 and Dec. 11-12, begins each evening at dusk when merchant “elves” illuminate the streets with 2,500 white paper bag luminaries. The merchants also flip the switches on strands of tiny white lights trimming the town’s buildings, many of which date to the 1800s.

Once the town is aglow, carolers fill the streets with music, musicians stroll the sidewalks playing Christmas favorites, and Santa visits with children in the town hall.

Shopkeepers add to the festivities by staying open late and serving holiday treats with hot cider and cocoa.

“If you’re having trouble getting into the holiday spirit, this festival will do wonders,” says Julie Spiro of the Jackson County Tourism Authority. “We’re often told that visiting the luminaries festival is like stepping into a Christmas painting.”

There’s no admission charge for the Festival of Lights & Luminaries, and lodging is plentiful with more than half of Jackson’s County guest rooms located in Dillsboro or within 15 minutes.

For information, go to www.visitdillsboro.org, or call the Jackson County Visitors Center at (800) 962-1911.

SYLVA–Incumbent town commissioner Stacy Knotts and challenger Danny Allen were the top vote-getters among five candidates for Sylva town board in elections held Tuesday.

Turnout was light, at 18% of 2,728 registered voters.

Allen, who previously sat on the board before being unseated by the narrowest possible margin two years ago, regained his seat by tying Knotts, 121-121, while incumbent Harold Hensley finished third with 111 votes. First-time candidates David Kelley and Ellerna Bryson Forney finished fourth and fifth, respectively.

Terms for Sylva board members are staggered – current members Sarah Graham and Ray Lewis will not stand for re-election until 2011.

Board member Maurice Moody ran unopposed to replace longtime mayor Brenda Oliver. The board will appoint a replacement to his seat when he is sworn in as mayor in December.

Sylva’s McDonald’s restaurant — the oldest franchise in town — will close for three months in early 2010 to replace its current structure. The local owners will completely remove the current building and replace it with another.

An upshot of the closure is that McDonald’s will be required to come into compliance with Sylva’s sign ordinance. The owners will have to remove the current, large, 80′s-era arches and replace them with a much smaller “monument” style sign.

Franchise owners approached the Sylva town board recently asking to keep their current sign. They expressed concern that their considerable setback from business 23, combined with the impact of a smaller sign, would hurt business. The circumstances disqualified McDonald’s from consideration for a variance, however, and the town asked the restaurant to come into compliance.

While the McDonald’s sign change requirement is tied to the length of the store closure, Sylva residents could see other sign changes soon. The ordinance prevents updates to current oversized signs; owners may not spruce them up without coming into compliance. As a result, current big signs such as those at Wendy’s restaurant and Ingle’s grocery store are likely to become gradually more dilapidated before they are ultimately replaced.

SYLVA–An imposing hotel construction project, dormant since early 2009, will remain unfinished for the foreseeable future according to the Smoky Mountain News.

Construction of the Clarion Inn on NC 107 N, near Walmart, ceased in January of 2009. In February, developers told the Sylva Herald that construction would resume in May. Construction did not resume and the bank that financed the project recently foreclosed.

Read the Smoky Mountain News story here.

SYLVA–Don’t get me wrong, I like lists, too. In fact, I remember a teenage addiction to that eighties phenomenon called “The Book of Lists“.

But these days, when publications have less and less money but reader’s appetites for content are growing leaps and bounds, the lists come at you from every direction. US News and World Report, for example, which was a weekly news staple when I was a kid, is now a monthly publication that seems sometimes wholly devoted to lists of schools, hospitals and whatnot.

Sylva and Cullowhee made a couple of lists recently. Cullowhee got a controversial edge over Boone and Asheville in North Carolina as a “better sports town” in the Sporting News, and Sylva was named by the Mother Earth News as one of 11 “Great Places You’ve (Maybe) Never Heard Of”.

The Sporting News list ranks 399 “sports cities” in the U.S., using a methodology that is vague at best. That aside, the upshot is a 199th-place finish for good ol’ Cullowhee, 15 spots ahead of Asheville and 26 ahead of Boone. The howls of wonderment from the Asheville Citizen-Times sports desk will likely brings wails of  self-defense from Western, all amounting to a tempest in a teapot.

Update: Citizen-Times sports editor Bob Berghaus back-pedaled like a slow cornerback today, publishing parts of an op-ed from WCU’s Gibbs Knotts and arriving at the conclusion, more or less, that maybe Cullowhee is a great sports burg, who knows?

Sylva, meanwhile, is unaccustomed to the limelight. The Reader’s home base is a busy working town, described, out of context, by Edward Abbey as having “the life of a market center and the dignity of a county seat”. You can get just about anything you need on Sylva’s Main Street, from fresh-brewed beer to fresh-roasted coffee to fresh-baked bread to fresh fish. You can still get shoes fixed here, and the downtown dentist’s family has been at the same trade in the same place for well over a century.

But in this pre-packaged age, Sylva doesn’t fit the mold of a “destination” (a surprise to its many visitors), so the tourism folks don’t circulate its name much.

Of course, the Mother Earth News isn’t all that concerned with tourism. Here’s what it said about Sylva, which was one of two southern towns to make its list:

“Sylva embodies a vibrant small town that engages its citizenry in a variety of ways,” said John Rockhold, managing editor for the magazine. “Mother Earth News focuses on cool things you can do to live wisely and create community, and we think our readers will identify with a place like Sylva.”

Read about Sylva in the Mother Earth News here.

The Western North Carolina Pottery Festival returns for its fifth year on Saturday, Nov. 7, with an expanded lineup and a special clay “Olympics” competition.

Event organizers continue to be surprised by the popularity achieved by the festival in a short period of time. With dozens of well-known applicants from across the nation, the number of juried potters has been expanded to 42 this year. Last year’s show had 36 exhibitors.

Dillsboro, NC

The 2009 festival includes potters from 13 states, including Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, New York and New Jersey, as well as North Carolina and surrounding states. The featured potter is Trent Berning of California.

“There are name potters in the show we never expected to have, and we had to turn away 30 potters, so there is competition to get in,” said organizer Joe Frank McKee of Dillsboro’s Tree House Pottery. “It’s become a premier event. We have potters from every type of clay medium.”

Berning, of Berning Clay Gallery in Fallbrook, Calif., has a master’s degree in ceramics from the University of Tennessee and is an instructor at two colleges. He is known for creating large pots featuring slip decoration, which uses fine clay in a variety of colors blended into liquid form and applied to pots.

Another artist of note is Richard Aerni of Rochester, NY. Aerni, a potter for 30 years, specializes in single-fired, wood-ash glazed functional stoneware. His work is sold in galleries across the country and is on display at the Smithsonian Institute.

New this year is the clay Olympics challenge from 1-3 p.m. Friday at Tree House Pottery. The competition is sponsored by Shimpo, a pottery equipment company, and includes 20 potters attempting to create the tallest cylinder and widest bowl in 10 minutes.

Saturday’s festival hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., rain or shine. Admission is $2 per person and includes a ticket for a day-long raffle. Children under 12 are admitted free.

“All the smiling faces in Jackson County and the people supporting the WNC Pottery Festival make this a special event,” said McKee. “Our potters like interacting with people and are willing to share information. They’re not just here for money, they’re here to share their craft.”

HIGHLANDS, N.C. – The Bascom is taking its community youth art classes up a notch with a new Saturday program for elementary through middle school age children.

Saturday Art School at The Bascom begins next Saturday, Oct. 24, for kindergartners through eighth graders. Fun, hands-on, age-appropriate art classes are held every Saturday from 10 a.m. to noon. Classes are held for two different age groups: grades K-3 and grades 4-8.

A student in a Bascom youth art class works on a project. A new program called Saturday Art School at The Bascom begins next Saturday, Oct. 24, for kindergartners through eighth graders. Registration is going on now.

The K-3rd Grade class will introduce children to all sorts of materials and methods of art making, with an emphasis on self-expression and immersion into the joy of creating.

The 4th-8th Grade class will cover the fundamentals of art while exploring a variety of media. While having fun with new materials and concepts, students will be gaining an understanding of the basic elements of art that form the foundation for future art study.

“Bring your child to art school for the morning,” said Norma Smith Hendrix, Bascom education director. “Parents can come and have coffee in The Bascom library while their child is in class, or they can drop off their child and enjoy a walk either on our nature trail or downtown Highlands.”

Cost is $64 for an eight-week session, with all materials included. Pre-registration is required and now open.

For more information or to register, visit www.thebascom.org or call (828) 526-4949 ext. 100.

Lily’s Treasures

Loretta Womack’s toy store “Lily’s Treasures”, open for about two years now at the corner of Main and Spring, is closing.

It’s a loss for Main St., in that it will leave a big hole at a prominent location, it’s a loss for the Downtown Sylva Association, of which Womack was president-elect, and it’s a loss for local families who like a step up from the standard fare, toy-wise.

“Almost all of the toys I carry have an underlying social or educational value, and they require interaction on the part of the child,” Womack told me recently. “Our kids need to explore and develop their own superheros and princesses,” she added. “Where is the imagination if all that is done for them?”

A nurse by trade, Womack has hired on with WestCare.

Spring Street Cafe

When most recent owner Lisa Agee closed Spring Street Cafe in late summer, it ended a 15-year stretch during which an eatery filled the spot beneath City Lights Bookstore.

Ownership of the restaurant has reverted to founder Faye Holliday, but the space still belongs to bookstore owners Joyce and Allen Moore.

The three are still considering possibilities, but clearly would like to see another dining establishment in the Spring Street space — one that’s as complementary as possible to a bookstore, Joyce Moore emphasizes.

REGIONAL–Asheville Citizen-Times op-ed contributor Kim MacQueen makes a pitch for the importance of town centers, using Asheville as an example.

She writes:

Despite their size, locally-owned businesses offer benefits to our communities that big-box stores simply cannot:

• Local flavor.
• Contributions to the local economy.
• Money spent in locally-owned businesses stays in the community.
• Donations to charities at more than twice the rate of national chains.

She also writes what the community needs to continue to improve:

• Continued support from the city government and Chamber of Commerce.
• To understand the problems with downtown are problems for all of us.
• To make a commitment to shop downtown and support local merchants …
• Those of us who live and work downtown have a responsibility to sustain our neighborhood, keeping it vital and attractive.

Read the specifics of her arguments here.

SYLVA–Heinzelmannchen Brewery in Sylva has released its 2009 Roktoberfest seasonal ale, and is getting ramped up for a fall-full of activities.

Brewmeister Dieter Kuhn describes the Roktoberfest as a “malty, deep amber ale with just a bit of hoppiness.” The brewery – located on Sylva’s Mill St. – is selling 4 oz. samples at the brewery. Customers can buy any of Heinzelmannchen’s beers in take-out, re-useable growlers, and the beer is also available at a variety of local restaurants.

Here’s a rundown of the brewery’s early autumn events:

Food and Beer pairing:
First Friday – Sep 4, 5-8 p.m.  AT the brewery
Guest Restaurant:  Cork & Cleaver from The Waynesville Inn Golf Resort and Spa

September 26 – Enjoy an Oktoberfest Festival at The Waynesville Inn Golf Resort and Spa
Delicious German Fare, Heinzelmannchen Brewery and Cats on Tap, Your Gnometown Band, playing Oompah music!

October 1, 2, 3 – Make reservations at Restaurant 553
Delicious German Fare, Heinzelmannchen Brewery and Cats on Tap, Your Gnometown Band, playing Oompah music!

October 2 – Food & Beer Pairing
AT the Brewery 5-8 p.m.
Guest Restaurant:  The Lake Club at Bear Lake Reserve

October 10 – You’re invited to Bear Lake Reserve for their Oktoberfest!
Delicious German Fare, Heinzelmannchen Brewery and Cats on Tap, Your Gnometown Band, playing Oompah music!