Bryan Garden is a true treasure for the region
To the Editor: I’d like to thank Quintin Ellison and The Smoky Mountain News for Ms. Ellison’s excellent article about…
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Road is in best interest of SCC and students
To the Editor: Having served for more than a decade as president of Southwestern Community College, I was dismayed by…
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Taking the sting from a wasp, and finding peace
Last night, lying in bed on the screened porch reading before darkness fell, I looked up from my book and…
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SCC road gets mired in questions about motives
A planned new access road that will provide an exit and entrance into Southwestern Community College in Webster should not…
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Don’t rush by this little Lake Junaluska treasure
I traveled over the Balsams this past weekend from Sylva to Lake Junaluska for a native plant sale, and I’m…
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Leadership Institute can solve problems
To the Editor: The Natural Resources Leadership Institute is a multi-faceted instructional and community service program of North Carolina Cooperative…
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House budget proposal goes down wrong path
To the Editor: The House in Raleigh recently passed a budget with deep spending cuts. According to Forbes.com, House Speaker…
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US policy on killing is confusing
With its unending contradictions, life is at best confusing and at worst inexplicable. The U.S. is in the minority of…
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Common sense loses to ideology in House budget proposal
North Carolina is facing a budget crisis. I get that. What I don’t get is the proposed slashing of so…
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TDA picks bad time to open visitor center
To the Editor: Regarding the monument to the Haywood County Tourism Development Authority, these two headlines are just too much…
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Waste in education lies with many bureaucrats
To the editor: Oh yeah, then there are the children. How many bureaucrats does it take to educate a child?…
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Don’t jump on the nuclear bandwagon
To the editor: With the recent rapid rise in gas prices, the hype about nuclear as an alternative source of…
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Winnowing through the homesteading sites for the cream of the crop
Some years ago, confined to an office through work obligations but dreaming of farming, I spent more time than I…
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Classrooms, like the rest of us, forced to make do
For both teachers in the classroom and local administrators, this is shaping up to be the most challenging budget year…
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Revaluation now was just a bad idea
To the Editor: Now that you have received the re-evaluations of your Haywood County property, are you pleased county commissioners…
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Weedeaters teach lesson in overkill
Just a few minutes into weedeating and I feel lobotomized. Perhaps the heady roar of the little engine that can…
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Make Haywood whole in redistricting
To the Editor: On Saturday, April 30, the Republican Party of Haywood County submitted a resolution to the Redistricting Committee…
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Where are the GOP-promised jobs?
To the Editor: Where are the real jobs? During the 2010 election season, an organization named Real Jobs NC targeted…
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Is Great Smoky Mountain Railroad serious?
To the Editor: At first the shakedown to the county was over $817,000 in grants and loans. Then, seeing that…
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Downtown Sylva deserves the support of the town board
We’ve written before about how important the downtown business districts in our mountain towns are to their communities, but it…
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If you need bees shaken out of a tree, here’s your man
The next time you are standing about the yard scratching your head in confusion about which tree climber in Jackson…
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Government-education complex is self-serving
To the Editor: What if you knew that your state senator or state representative knew there were proven ways to…
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Those who protect children deserve thanks
To the Editor: For almost 20 years I have found myself involved in the concern of child abuse either professionally…
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Our representatives forget who is boss
To the Editor: Here we go again. Our two state representatives, both of whom are Democrats, fail to see the…
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With care, many hemlocks can survive
To the Editor: With all due respect to Mr. Ellison — who wrote in his “Back Then” column a few…
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I know the game is rigged, but I’m still all in
The crane games are beautiful beasts, shiny and brightly lit, with a glass belly full of forlorn and lonely stuffed…
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Macon County needs to clean up litter
To the Editor: Circumstances have prevented the organization of the annual county-wide litter pick-up/recycling event to celebrate Earth Day here…
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GOP Medicare plan is totally off-base
To the Editor: The Republican design on Medicare comes straight from that dubious chapter of the Vietnam War in which…
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Will McCoy Bridge become a memory?
Once more the Department of Transpor-tation will come to Macon County, in the name of listening to community input, when…
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Accepting federal rail money a bad idea
To the Editor: In the April 6-12 issue of The Smoky Mountain News, Carole Larivee wrote a letter to the…
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Recession makes McCoy Bridge rehab an even better idea
Governments at all levels and all across the nation are broke. At every county courthouse and state house, money taken…
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A busy person’s guide to growing great salads
Tonight’s menu calls for salad from the garden, which reminded me to jot down a method for growing lettuce that,…
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Military budget is where we should look for cuts
To the Editor: If the Republican Congress were really serious about balancing the budget they would take a long hard…
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Haywood revaluation will kill jobs
To the Editor: The commercial property owners, the merchants who rent property for their small, medium and large businesses, deserve…
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In my dreams, it’s raspberry fields forever
Raspberries, like any fruit we plant, represent an act of faith. As others are doing this time of year, this…
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Finding a creative way out of the real estate dilemma
By Mark Jamison • Guest Columnist A fellow once asked me, about a car I was selling, “What’s the least…
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Haywood Chamber needs visitor center
To the Editor: The Haywood County Tourism Development Authority board has voted to cut funding to the Haywood County Chamber…
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Take N.C. 107 bypass off priority list
To the Editor: Jackson County Commissioners are ranking road improvement projects in the County’s Comprehensive Transportation Plan (CTP) at their…
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Voter ID bill just a waste of good money
To the Editor: As an advocate for seniors and senior services, I find I am more and more concerned about…
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GOP legislators try to block federal money
To the Editor: The good news is the North Carolina Department of Transportation has received a $461 million federal grant…
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Katahdins proving to be great sheep for these mountains
Maybe I’m just self-absorbed, but I swear that when I’m interested in something, it often seems as if the whole…
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For better or worse, for normal or weird
One of the advantages of getting older is that you learn a few things if you pay attention. For example,…
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Growing the connection between farms and consumers
Friends of mine in the Jackson County farming community have launched a joint CSA, which is short for Community Sustained…
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The attack of the killer jumping worms
It wiggles nicely on a hook at the end of a fishing line. It also has such a large appetite…
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Still no jobs from new GOP leaders
To the Editor: Where are the jobs? The new Republican majority in the North Carolina state legislature promised just that…
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The real costs of energy consumption
To the Editor: Humans need to know that our lives have meaning. Our searches for meaning are labeled religion and…
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GOP takes hypocrisy to a new low
To the Editor: Hypocrisy is defined as the “condition of a person pretending to be something he is not, especially…
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Cutting administrative costs preserves jobs, quality of education
By Linda Seested-Stanford • Guest columnist In last week’s Smoky Mountain News, coverage of the reorganization of Western Carolina University’s…
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Voter ID bill a shopworn GOP idea
To the Editor: What happens when you fix something that ain’t broke? You’re sure to break something else. But the…
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We don’t want motocross track
To the Editor: We turn on our televisions every day and witness to the devastation that neighbors inflict on neighbors.…
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