The monthly “Waynesville First Friday: Shop, Sip, Stroll” will take place from 5-8 p.m. Friday, June 5, in downtown.

The downtown merchant corridor transforms into a lively celebration of local art, music and community. Stroll the streets, explore galleries, meet artists, enjoy live music and discover local shops and delicious restaurants. 

Haywood County’s Black Generational Wealth committee is the product of a long-dissolved 2020 book club. 

That year, a white police officer murdered an unarmed Black man named George Floyd with the assistance of three other officers.  Like many COVID-era racial justice collectives, the book club was a response to the horrific act perpetrated in Minneapolis, said committee chair Nancy Thomason.  

Prominent Latina storyteller Carolina Quiroga will join the “Conversations with Storytellers’ series at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 14, at Pigeon Community Multicultural Development Center in Waynesville.

Quiroga delivers bilingual tales designed to bridge cultural gaps, drawing on myths, fables and personal stories. Her work aims to foster empathy and understanding through multicultural narratives. 

Friends, family and allies dressed in red, some with signs like “no more stolen sisters” and “gun violence is on the rise,” gathered on May 5 at Oconaluftee Island Park. They’d shown up for the Qualla Boundary’s seventh annual missing and murdered Indigenous relatives/people march, coinciding with national week of action events across the country in communities impacted by what some scholars describe as a “a modern form of genocide.”  

Editor’s note

As Tony Dillard notes in this guest column, we’ve printed two other opinion pieces over the last two weeks by Waynesville aldermen Chuck Dickson and Jon Feichter regarding this annexation and the issue of whether these housing developments fit into the character of Waynesville. It’s unusual for The Smoky Mountain News to then give this much space to a third opinion piece, but given the importance of this issue — how will we grow — we decided to give Mr. Dillard the opportunity to voice his concerns. To note, Dillard is a private citizen in Waynesville.

— Scott McLeod, SMN Editor 

To the Editor:

In light of the shortcomings in the Town of Waynesville Development Plan surfaced by Queen’s Farm phases 1 and 2, it might be a good time to look back to the 1990s when the Old Asheville Highway was slated for improvement — from where Lowe’s is now to Downtown Waynesville.

That windy two-lane road into town was scheduled to be straightened and widened. NCDOT spent an enormous amount of time and effort to engage the community in order to learn of concerns and needs before drawing up a plan.

On April 14, the Waynesville Town Council voted 4-1 to annex the Queen’s Farm/Valleywood Farms Phase 2 property into the town limits. As part of the Town of Waynesville, an annexed property receives services, is subject to zoning and other town regulations and pays property taxes. 

I voted to annex Phase 2 of Valleywood Farms, and I want to tell you why. 

A special April 9 Tribal Council session was entirely dedicated to a single resolution meant to protect a general contractor by asserting an easement for the right-of-way over leased Qualla Boundary properties involving “a reasonable and common ingress, egress and utilities.”

While the resolution reiterated a clause that had already been established, the meeting exposed a growing rift, present also at the April 2 regular meeting, between business interests and tribal members.

It’s been over a year and a half since the hollow ping of softball bats has rung out over Waynesville’s Dutch Fisher Field, but on April 13, teams again enjoyed the chance to kick up some dust on their favorite diamond. 

When Hurricane Helene decimated the area in September 2024, many community institutions lost so much. Mountaineer Little League lost two fields, including Dutch Fisher.

Silicon Valley and Sylva are about as different as any two places can be, but they do share at least one thing in common. 

In Cupertino, billion-dollar office buildings rise within sight of tents and tarps. People sleep in cars or on bare ground backdropped by a landscape where extreme wealth and extreme poverty exist side by side.