The Town of Dillsboro is launching a grant program to help struggling businesses using $200,000 it received as part of the value engineering proposal for the Haywood Road bridge project.

A new detour for local traffic and passenger vehicles is now available to bypass the road closure caused by the ongoing bridge replacement on Haywood Road over Scott Creek in Dillsboro.

Plans for a $14 million bridge project in Dillsboro have changed, with the project now expected to take nine months instead of three years and to cost $3 million less than originally proposed. 

A proposed change of plans in the Dillsboro bridge project has drawn divided opinion from the towns of Dillsboro and Sylva. 

In August, Jackson County commissioners voted unanimously to buy 3.67 acres along Haywood Road in Dillsboro to use as the new site for the area’s recycling drop-off center. But Dillsboro’s town board is now voicing staunch opposition to the move, claiming that the plan would adversely affect the town’s economy and cause problems with traffic and litter. 

After a closed session discussion during its Aug. 20 meeting, the Jackson County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to buy a pair of properties along Haywood Road in Dillsboro as part of a plan to remake the county’s existing Green Energy Park. 

In a region as rich in local lore as this, it may seem like every story’s been told to death, including that of the infamous Cowee Tunnel disaster. 

North Carolina, though, is also home to the old-world tradition of telling stories through song and has an ample supply of musicians like Balsam Range frontman Buddy Melton and his buddies, Haywood native Milan Miller and Piedmont bassist Mark W. Winchester, who on their 2010 album Songs From Jackson County relate the incident about as well as anyone else ever could.

Just as millennia of rain and wind and heat and cold have carved the physical shape of the mountains for which Appalachia is named, so have years of immigration and emigration and peace and war carved the human culture that covers them. Through the centuries, each of millions of lives — men and women, Cherokee and white, black and Hispanic — has added its own chapter to the story. 

It’s shaping up to be a big year for the Appalachian Women’s Museum in Dillsboro. The nonprofit is preparing for its second annual Airing of the Quilts event, will get an artistically designed storytelling installation on its grounds if a grant Western Carolina University is working on goes through, and hopes to start regularly opening its doors to the public during Saturdays summer. 

Eleven months ago, the Jackson County Commissioners voted unanimously to approve development of a river park on county-owned land along the Tuckasegee River in Dillsboro.