A new archival facility, reimagined exhibit space and a website overhaul are all on the horizon for the Museum of the Cherokee Indian as Shana Bushyhead Condill  enters her second year leading the organization.

Jutting off from the left side of a typically busy Blue Ridge Parkway pull-off overlooking Mills River, an unassuming dirt path dips into the woods and winds its way east, just out of view of the famed scenic drive.

I know what you were thinking this morning. 

You were thinking: “With all the recent talk about Women’s History Month, I wonder when someone is going to talk about the History of the Uterus?”

The war in Ukraine may seem a million miles away, but one doesn’t have to travel halfway across the world to find the Western perspective on it. A small group of scholars from Western Carolina University in Cullowhee — some with roots in the war-torn region — are using their experience and academic skillsets to help educate the public about a complicated, confusing conflict that is already beginning to have global implications.

One of the most beautiful settings in Western North Carolina is Lake Logan, a sizable body of water captured between steep-forested mountainsides in southern Haywood County. Champion Fibre Company constructed this reservoir in 1932 on the West Fork of the Pigeon River — a tributary of the Pigeon River. Their primary purpose for doing this was to supplement the flow of water to the pulp and paper mill in Canton, especially during dry periods of low rainfall. 

Valentine’s Day, like so many of the seemingly trivial holidays that dot our calendars, originated thousands of years ago as a Pagan celebration. Over the centuries Lupercalia, a Roman holiday, morphed into the feast day of Saint Valentine and eventually into today’s Hallmark version - Valentine’s Day. 

Today, almost nothing remains of Waynesville’s majestic old Victorian-era hotel — except for some faded photographs and sepia-toned memories that linger in the minds of the region’s oldest inhabitants — but recent action by the town’s aldermen could go a long way in preserving what’s left of a natural spring that was responsible for producing much, much more than cold, stinky water.

The history of the Nikwasi Mound in Franklin will soon be part of a Smithsonian Museum traveling exhibit that will tour around the U.S.

By Molly Phillips • Contributing writer | Over the summer, 16 students from Western Carolina University — led by Dr. Brett Riggs, Dr. Jane Eastman and field assistant Karen Biggert — drove each weekday from Cullowhee to Franklin to spend more than four hot, sticky weeks outdoors. Their mission? To apply scientific techniques to discover archaeological evidence on Mainspring’s Watauga Mound  property, and learn more about what northern Macon County looked like hundreds of years ago. 

It’s not the first thing people usually think of when they try to recount the relative prosperity of a community over generations.