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.

The New York Times uses one of its killer graphics to describe Facebook’s complicated privacy options.

Writes Nick Bilton in this article:

Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons. To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options.

FRANKLIN–The Land Trust for the Little Tennessee (LTLT) would like to thank Governor Perdue for recommending continued funding for the Clean Water Management Trust Fund (CWMTF) at $50 million for the upcoming fiscal year.

Her support is vital in making sure that conservation remains a priority in these tough economic times. With the governor’s budget recommendations, she has recognized that conservation projects create jobs in many communities hit hard by the recession. The state parks system, for example, continues to set records for both visitors and economic impact (more than $400 million per year).

LTLT hopes legislators will also continue to recognize the value of conservation, and we urge them to support conservation funding as the General Assembly works on its budget legislation.

In response to losing more natural lands than any other state in the country over the last decade, North Carolina has shown exceptional national leadership in conserving its irreplaceable natural resources. Thanks to the North Carolina’s investment through its four conservation trust funds, communities across the state have formed private and public (local, state and federal) partnerships to leverage state dollars and maximize economic benefits.

The Clean Water Management Trust Fund’s board has identified dozens of quality conservation and clean water projects that are ready to close upon receipt of funding. These projects will protect our most important economic resource–a clean water supply. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that it is 20 to 400 times more expensive to treat polluted water than to prevent contamination through watershed protection.

LTLT as well as local counties and and regional municipalities have received grants from the Clean Water Management Trust Fund since 1996 providing funding to cover closing costs such as surveys and appraisals for perpetual conservation easements on streams, rivers and wetlands. In many cases, trust fund grants supported the partial purchase of development rights from landowners who wanted to ensure their land would never be developed. However the CWMTF tap was virtually turned off in 2008/09 due to the state’s budget crisis.

LTLT and North Carolina’s twenty-four other land trusts work in partnership with willing landowners and the state to protect our most critical sources of clean water, wildlife habitat, and farmland, which sustains North Carolina’s economy. Projects funded by our state’s four conservation trust funds have set aside thousands of acres for the public to hike, fish, hunt, canoe, bird and sightsee. In western North Carolina, public recreational areas conserved by CWMTF funding include the Needmore Game Lands in Swain and Macon Counties; Pinnacle Park in Jackson County, Lands Creek watershed in Swain County and Mable Creek watershed in Cherokee County. CWMTF has also helped to conserve important farmland such as the Spring Ridge Dairy in Macon County.

KITUWAH–A controversy over Duke Energy’s plans to build a relay station in Kituwah valley near Bryson City has reached the boiling point.

The relay station, serviced by multiple 100-foot towers, is being constructed on a parcel of land that Duke owns near the Kituwah Mound – one of the most sacred spots of the Cherokee.

The Cherokee and various citizens’ groups protested, and in March the Swain County Board of Commissioners halted construction by means of a moratorium.

The controversy is now playing out before the North Carolina Utilities Commission, with Duke Energy telling the commission this week that the region is threatened by outages and blackouts if the station isn’t completed.

The Cherokee had expected Duke to acquiesce, but Duke seems prepared to make a stand on the Kituwah site.

Russell Townsend, the tribe’s historical preservation officer, doubts that the tribe will accept a decision to complete construction quietly.

“There will be trouble,” Townsend told John Murawski of the Raleigh News and Observer. “I can’t imagine if Duke proceeds to build there that the tribe would just say, ‘That’s a shame,’ and move along.”

Commenters to the N&O story have pointed out that electricity production is by definition obtrusive, and that the Cherokee gaming industry is one of the region’s biggest users of power. Others point out that the issue is transmission, rather than production, and that electricity has to be transmitted no matter how it is produced.

Up-to-date coverage on this week’s hearings is available from the News and Observer here, here and here.

Earlier coverage of the controversy appeared in the Smoky Mountain News here, here and here.

RALEIGH–New numbers from Public Policy Polling show Sen Richard Burr’s numbers are falling against either of the two possible Democratic nominees who might run against him this fall.

Burr now leads Elaine Marshall by a single percentage point, and Cal Cunningham by five points.

Burr has been widely predicted to win easily in November, but these numbers, combined with a shaky statewide approval rating (37% positive, 40% negative), suggest that the race might be tighter than expected.

Neither Marshall nor Cunningham  – the top two Democratic vote-getters in the May 4 primary – reached the 40% margin necessary to prevent a run-off. That vote will occur on June 22.

CULLOWHEE – Ron Rash, the John and Dorothy Parris Distinguished Professor of Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, is the recipient of a prestigious O. Henry Prize for 2010.

Rash received the award, his second O. Henry Prize, for his short story “Into the Gorge,” published in the fall 2008 edition of The Southern Review. His is one of 20 stories selected from across the nation for the 2010 prize.

The Atlantic Monthly says that O. Henry Prizes are “widely regarded as the nation’s most prestigious awards for short fiction.”

The prize is named in honor of William Sidney Porter, who adopted the pseudonym of O. Henry. A fiction writer with an illustrious life, O. Henry penned many of his stories in prison. When he was released from prison, he was invited to New York, where he continued to write for the next eight years until his death in 1910.

Among past winners of the O. Henry Prize are such influential writers as Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Thurber, James Baldwin, Woody Allen, Mary McCarthy, Alice Walker, Chaim Potok, J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, E.L. Doctorow, Andrea Barrett, John Irving and Stephen King.

Rash’s “Into the Gorge” is published along with other prizewinning stories in a collection titled “The O. Henry Prize Stories 2010” by Anchor Books. Laura Furman, an award-winning novelist, short-story writer and essayist, is editor of the collection.

In her introduction to this year’s collection, Furman calls Rash “one of our best living storytellers” and praises his story as “emblematic of Rash’s work and his precise, modest, often beautiful prose.”

The O. Henry Prize is the latest in a series of awards received by Rash. He is recipient of the 2009 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction for his fourth novel, “Serena.” The award is presented annually by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association in recognition of works of fiction that exhibit “creative and imaginative quality, excellence of style, universality of appeal, and relevance to North Carolina and her people.” He also won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award in 2006 – that one for his third novel, “The World Made Straight.”

Rash, who teaches in the English department at Western Carolina, is author of two other critically acclaimed novels based in the Appalachians – his debut novel, “One Foot in Eden,” and “Saints at the River” from 2004. He came to WCU in 2003 from the University of South Carolina, where he served as visiting writer in the graduate creative writing program.

Jonathan Hearne

Originally posted July 13, 2009

LEICESTER-Once, in a field near Franklin, Jonathan Hearne was hit by lightning. Or rather, lightning struck the tool he was using to shear wool off a sheep. The bolt then jumped from the shears to his knees, and with a burst of flame “blew the bottoms off his feet” and killed the sheep.

Jonathan Hearne is a sheep-shearer. His days aren’t this hard as a rule, but it’s pretty tough work, and it doesn’t pay too well unless you work fast.

He owns property between Newfound and Leicester – at the eastern end of Haywood County – that his parents bought in 1966, and he works that land, but he makes his principal living traveling seven southeastern states and visiting farms to shear their flocks.

Like many of us, Hearne had no real idea that this is where life would lead him. “I never dreamed thirty-three years ago, when I was first doing this for a living, that I’d be shearing sheep thirty-three years later,” he says with a laugh. But he adds that he loves it.

A native of Pennsylvania, Hearne learned his trade from an old-time Iowan. Traveling shearers often take on helpers – apprentices, more or less, – that travel with them. That’s how Hearne learned. Then, in 1976, he came to the mountains.

His parents, who had been dairy farmers in Pennsylvania from 1938 until 1966, preceded him by a decade.

“I heard stories about a fellow in Fines Creek that could shear 100 sheep a day,” Hearne recalls. “I thought ‘there’s never been a bigger lie told in these mountains’, but then I saw him shear and I thought ‘OK, that’s different’”.

As he honed his skills, Hearne eventually doubled — nearly tripled — that number.

Now he travels with his son, Ben, a graduate of Earlham College, and they carry on what is becoming a family tradition. The shearing circuit is by no means high living, but they have a good time.

“We’ve got a lot of friends in a lot of places,” says Hearne. “Sometimes we camp out, sometimes we’re invited in. Because we’re sheep shearers, we’re obviously not in it for the money, so we’re generally trusted. We’re welcomed as someone who can do something that people really appreciate. And the people we meet are good. As a general rule, scoundrels don’t keep sheep.”

The economy of keeping sheep for wool is, at this point, poor. In the 1980’s the per pound price of wool started to fall, by the late 90’s it was desperately low – around 3 cents per pound. That was the beginning of the end. Three decades ago, Hearne says, wool sold for around one dollar per pound.

“Wool from your general cross-bred sheep isn’t worth much,” he says.

The main reason that many people keep flocks these days, he adds, is so they can maintain their land’s “agricultural” designation, which has tax advantages.

CULLOWHEE – L. Douglas Wilder, the first African-American elected governor in the United States, told a group of Western Carolina University students, faculty and staff that there is still progress to be made in terms of race relations, despite the historic election of Barack Obama as president in 2008.

Recent controversy over Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s comments that a light-skinned, articulate black was more palatable to white American voters provides evidence that America has not advanced as far as many may think, Wilder said Wednesday, Jan. 20.

In a talk titled “The Movement: Past, Present and Future” that was part of WCU’s Martin Luther King Jr. celebration week activities, he spoke about the irony of Reid’s comments coming 20 years after Wilder’s own election as governor of Virginia – a state that once was the seat of the Confederate South.

“That election in 1989 seemed to signify that voters were ready to judge candidates not by the color of the skin, but by the content of their character,” Wilder said, borrowing a phrase from King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. “Here today, Reid is saying that, 20 years later, we really haven’t crossed that threshold.”

Although Reid has since apologized to Obama for private remarks that were made public in the new book “Game Change” about the 2008 presidential election, he still needs to apologize to the rest of the country, Wilder said, calling the embattled politician’s statements among “the most dreadful comments in American political history” and “a slap in the face of the American people.”

Wilder reminded the audience that, throughout American history, progress typically has not been made through big, permanent changes. “It’s about small, consistent steps forward achieving that dream,” he said.

Wilder urged attendees to become aware of the false hopes and false steps that can derail efforts to strive for the American dream. “Don’t ignore your problems, hoping they’ll just go away,” he said. “Don’t think that if you just be patient and wait your turn, you’ll eventually get your time at the front of the line. And don’t think that only insiders know what’s best.”

He also warned against the impact of an increase in selfishness, violence and acceptance of mediocrity on the ability of today’s young people to continue to make progress. “What we need to do next is to not stop dreaming,” he said. “Barack Obama’s election has elicited the need for new dreams.”

Too many people today are quick to blame their problems on others, he said, telling the crowd that his mother constantly reminded him that he could do anything he set his mind to, and that his teachers never complained about a lack of resources.

The WCU event was sponsored by the Office of the Chancellor, the Office of Multicultural Affairs, and the Martin Luther King Jr. planning committee.

(Hat tip: Ashvegas)

Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) released the seventh annual “Ready or Not? Protecting the Public’s Health from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism” report, which finds that the H1N1 flu outbreak has exposed serious underlying gaps in the nation’s ability to respond to public health emergencies and that the economic crisis is straining an already fragile public health system.

The report contains state-by-state health preparedness scores based on 10 key indicators to assess health emergency preparedness capabilities.

Twenty states scored six or less out of 10 key indicators of public health emergency preparedness.  Nearly two-thirds of states scored seven or less.  Eight states tied for the highest score of nine out of 10: Arkansas, Delaware, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, and Vermont. Montana had the lowest score at three out of 10.  The preparedness indicators are developed in consultation with leading public health experts based on data from publicly available sources or information provided by public officials.

Overall, the report found that the investments made in pandemic and public health preparedness over the past several years dramatically improved U.S. readiness for the H1N1 outbreak.  But it also found that decades of chronic underfunding meant that many core systems were not at-the-ready.  Some key infrastructure concerns were a lack of real-time coordinated disease surveillance and laboratory testing, outdated vaccine production capabilities, limited hospital surge capacity, and a shrinking public health workforce.  In addition, the report found that more than half of states experienced cuts to their public health funding and federal preparedness funds have been cut by 27 percent since fiscal year (FY) 2005, which puts improvements that have been made since the September 11, 2001 tragedies at risk.

See a synopsis of the report here.

CLEMSON–Trailing 56-51 with eight minutes to play, Western Carolina looked to be in a decent spot to make a run Tuesday night at Littlejohn Coliseum. Instead, the Catamounts went stone cold from the field and gave up a 23-6 run down the stretch to lose 79-57 to the 24th-ranked Tigers.

The loss was Western’s first in ten games, and drops the Cats to 10-2.

WCU was without the services of last week’s Southern Conference player of the week Mike Williams, a guard who scored 24 points in Western’s win at Louisville Dec. 12. Williams twisted an ankle in practice over the weekend.

Read more here from ESPN
Read more here from WCU
Read more here from Clemson
Asheville Citizen-Times staffs the game

DILLSBORO–The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld on Tuesday the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruling that the Dillsboro Dam should be removed.

From an Asheville Citizen-Times staff report:

The court today denied Jackson County’s petition for review of FERC’s July 2007 order allowing Duke Energy to remove the historic dam.

Read more here, from Lynn Hotaling at the Sylva Herald.

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.

GSMNP–Congressman Heath Shuler recently helped secure a $13 million down-payment from the federal government to help put an end to the nearly-seven-decade controversy over a road once planned along the north shore of Lake Fontana.

The payment, part of a larger, undisclosed sum, would compensate Swain County for the federal government’s choice not to build the road, which was promised in 1943.

National Parks Traveler writer Danny Bernstein gives a history of the controversy here.

Here’s an excerpt:

The North Shore Road issue was revived again in 2001 when former Congressman Charles Taylor, a Republican from western North Carolina, obtained $16 million for further construction of the North Shore Road. This set off a process that looked into the environmental impact of a 35-mile road. The National Park Service held public input forums in various locations around the Smokies and accepted comments from anyone in the U.S. on various ways to resolve the 1943 agreement. Thousands of pages were generated, reviewed, and discussed. Descendants of the original settlers were the only ones who wanted a road in the park. Almost all comments were against the road and for a financial settlement with Swain County, where Fontana Dam is located, one of the four parties to the original agreement.

In December 2007, the Department of the Interior made a decision that officially called for a yet-to-be-specified multi-million-dollar monetary settlement to Swain County instead of a road through one of the most pristine and untouched areas in the East. Though the park is now protected and the North Shore Road will never be built, Congress still has to approve the funds to settle the 1943 agreement.

MURPHY–An elementary and middle school in the Murphy area could be the first in the region to implement an extensive solar power array if the Cherokee County school board gives the green light.

The 4,300 panel array would cut power costs at St. Martins Elementary and Middle School by 85% over 20 years, with a total cost avoidance of over $1 million, according to school superintendent Stephen Lane.

The system would be paid for by green energy tax credits issued by Blue Ridge Mountain Electric Membership Corp.

Read a story about the project from Lizz Harold at Murphy’s Cherokee Scout here.

Follow this link for Duke Energy power outage information.

2009-12-18: Fans and foes of a controversial youth dance club in Sylva aired their thoughts before the Sylva Town Board Thursday. Opponents of “Club Offspring” provided a petition asking the board to investigate the business and to consider closing it. Proponents said the controversy is overblown, and provided a petition of their own. Either way, said Mayor Maurice Moody, we have no evidence that any laws have been broken, but we’ll keep an eye on it.

The dust-up arose after the club, which doesn’t serve alcohol or admit patrons over the age of 24, circulated a flyer that invited teens to come to the venue “as wasted as you want”.

Asheville television WLOS spent the day in Sylva — seeming a little more breathless than the story deserved — and aired images from the club’s MySpace page that showed scantily-dressed teens. One club-goer’s response, in so many words, was that when you dance for hours at a time you need a way to cool off.

More here from WLOS.
More here from the Asheville Citizen-Times.
More here from the Sylva Herald (link will expire in one week)

Sylva teen club draws ire

A teen and young adult party club doing business in Sylva has raised the ire of parents by circulating sketchy flyers that urge kids to “come as wasted as they want” to the venue, located near the intersection of NC 107 and Business 23 downtown.

“Club Offspring”, which does not serve alcohol, advertises that it allows “no adults”.

The flyers, which made their way into the local high school, also made their way into the hands of a local parent, Brian Bartel, who went to Asheville television WLOS with the story and is circulating a petition that he plans to present to the Sylva town board on Thursday. The petition asks the town to shut the club down.

It’s unlikely that the board will have legal standing to do so, whether or not it has the inclination.

Here’s the story from WLOS, in which the station notes that the club’s 22-year-old owner is in the slammer for statutory rape.

More here from Justin Goble at the Sylva Herald.

Bryson City pub owner cited in underage drinking death

The Asheville Citizen-Times Josh Boatwright writes that Charles Hutchinson, owner of Mickey’s Pub in downtown Bryson City, served numerous drinks to an underage patron on May 17, and that that patron left and promptly drove into a nearby building, killing himself.

Hutchinson faces a criminal citation and the suspension of his liquor license.

MURPHY–Dwight Otwell, staff writer for the Cherokee Scout in Murphy, reported recently about efforts made by mountain farmers to diversify and to profit from niche crops.

Agriculture has dwindled rapidly in the mountains, where farmers face not only the standard competition from industrial farming, but the added challenge of a lack of flat land.

Otwell’s lead:

Farmers who make their entire livelihood from working the land are almost a relic from the past in Cherokee County.

As the number of large farms has steadily dwindled, a new type of farmer has emerged, one who can forge a living from an acre or two growing for a specialty market.

He goes on to interview a vintner, a dairy farmer and vegetable farmers, all of whom are using innovative methods to make their famrs work.

Another excerpt:

A new type of market is using the Internet to sell products to high-end restaurants or consumers. The main market for this area is Atlanta.

The idea is that a chef gets the fresh produce he wants the next day, Wood said. The chef knows the farm the produce comes from and he trusts it. A person with as little as a half acre of land willing to grow specialty crops can make $20,000 to $30,000 an acre.

Read Otwell’s story in the Scout here.

NATIONAL–The New York Times published an extensive feature about drinking water this week, with a focus on outdated regulations and a great deal of extra information.

Here’s the lead from the Times’s Charles Duhigg:

The 35-year-old federal law regulating tap water is so out of date that the water Americans drink can pose what scientists say are serious health risks — and still be legal.

Only 91 contaminants are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, yet more than 60,000 chemicals are used within the United States, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates. Government and independent scientists have scrutinized thousands of those chemicals in recent decades, and identified hundreds associated with a risk of cancer and other diseases at small concentrations in drinking water, according to an analysis of government records by The New York Times.

But not one chemical has been added to the list of those regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act since 2000.

The Times story package includes access to the Environmental Working Group‘s national drinking water database, from which readers can easily find test results on water systems across our region. Examine whether contaminants in your water supply met two standards: the legal limits established by the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the typically stricter health guidelines.

Follow the links below to search up your system:

Jackson County

Graham County

Macon County

Clay County

Cherokee County

Swain County

Read the New York Times story here.

FONTANA VILLAGE–A legal battle is brewing between Fontana Village Resort and Graham County government over a first-time $80,000 property tax bill that the resort says is being levied against leased property.

At issue is whether the property leased by the resort from the Tennessee Valley Authority is taxable. Erma Phillips, Chief Tax Assessor for Graham County, contends that a recent court ruling makes “leasehold” properties taxable, and that the Village land is such a property,

Attorneys for Fontana Village say that fees of a comparable amount, paid annually by the TVA, stand in place of the taxes, and that Graham County’s collection attempts amount to double taxation.

Read a story by James Budd of the Graham Star here.

CULLOWHEE–The Asheville Citizen-Times’s Keith Jarrett reports that Western Carolina University head football coach Dennis Wagner has turned down an offer to join new Kansas coach Turner Gill as an assistant coach.

Wagner said he was offered the job as offensive line coach and assistant head coach by Gill, the former Nebraska quarterback who left the head coaching job at Buffalo to take over the Jayhawks.

“Turner offered me the job Saturday night and I turned it down Tuesday morning,” Wagner said.  “I told him it was in my best interests to stay at Western Carolina.”

Blog post here.