From military campaign to political campaign

If politics makes strange bedfellows, then surely Rutherford Trace offers some curious pillow talk in the legislative halls of Raleigh and Washington, D.C.

Champion and Blue Ridge Paper timeline

1893 — The town of Pigeon River is reincorporated by the N.C. General Assembly as Canton, N.C.

The birth of a Haywood County institution: Negotiations for the Champion Fibre Mill and Peter G. Thomson’s Labor Day Legacy

By Patrick Willis • Guest Writer

Just more than 100 years ago, Canton welcomed a man from Ohio who would change the town’s history forever.

In early 1905, an industrialist named Peter G. Thomson decided to visit Western North Carolina with the hopes of building a pulp mill and extract plant to supply his paper factories in Ohio. Thomson knew vast timber in the Southern Appalachian Mountains would greatly benefit his business.

A man in full: Cashiers Historical Society, biographers, history experts and fans explore the life and complex times of Wade Hampton III

By Michael Beadle

Growing up in South Carolina, Robert Lathan remembers how just about everything and everyone was named after Wade Hampton — schools, parks, hotels, towns, and especially children. More than a century after Hampton’s death, this wealthy landowner, Confederate general, governor and senator of South Carolina continues to cast a long shadow on the lands and the people he encountered — including the Cashiers community in Jackson County.

Rash draws on his own Civil War ties in his new novel, The World Made Straight

By Sarah Kucharski • Staff Writer

History books and literature long have recounted and regaled the Civil War, examined its long-lasting effects in determining who “we” are as a great and unified South, and how “we” are not yet ready to lay down arms between victor and vanquished.

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