The Town of Sylva is embarking on a five-year plan to revitalize Mill Street with updated façades as part of the design pillar of the Main Street Sylva Association. 

Every five years, the Main Street Sylva Association’s Board of Directors creates an economic development plan, and this year, the focus is on downtown’s Mill Street. 

Longstanding plans for a park near the Pigeon Street corridor are about to move forward, as are other plans designed to connect — physically and symbolically — Waynesville’s bustling Main Street with the town’s historic African American neighborhood. 

When the Town of Canton relaunched its Labor Day Festival a couple years ago, it was in a crucial move to reinvent the century-old event — and also the downtown itself.

From the outside, John Burgin looks like a lucky guy, a guy in the right place at the right time to cash in on the revitalization sweeping Hazelwood.

Telling people what to do with their property is not an easy job, even when a town’s local economy may depend on it.

Downtown Canton has seen better days. 

A once vibrant and bustling Main Street is now struggling to hang on to its few surviving businesses. Some of its historic buildings are now vacant and falling into disrepair.

Fred Baker’s title isn’t particularly glamorous. For nearly three decades, he kept the potholes patched, the trash picked up, the sewer lines repaired, the clean water flowing, the lights on and the gutters swept all over Waynesville.

“It is a slow news day when public works is in the paper,” Baker said.

The clock is ticking for Canton to spend $25,000 in remaining grant money from the N.C. Rural Center.

Susan Gathers was kicked back in the student union one afternoon, her thumbs poised over her smart phone, simultaneously bantering with friends while texting — sometimes even texting the same person she was talking to.

This impressive skill to seamlessly dialogue in multiple mediums at once is nothing new for “Generation Next-ers” like Gathers. But unlike the typical truncated words and vowel-less abbreviations that permeate normal text-speak, her screen was filled with Cherokee syllables as she pushed send.