Bethel Middle School teacher Sally Hundley was named Haywood County Schools’ 2023 Teacher of the Year.

When Gary Griffith woke up a rainy Tuesday on Aug. 17, 2021, he never imagined that by the next morning, the 12 acres of green peppers he’d grown along the Pigeon River in Bethel would rest in drifts miles downstream, the unofficial symbol  of the catastrophic tragedy that was Tropical Storm Fred.  

At 5 p.m., the August sun is hot and high overhead as my husband and I walk through the hodgepodge of parked cars at The Ten Acre Garden. It’s more crowded than I expected, but then again, I didn’t really know what to expect — I’ve never been here before. 

By the end of the night, I’ll be wondering why it took me so long to arrive. 

Heavy rains and high winds associated with strong storms last Sunday night led to plenty of headaches Monday morning, as downed limbs cut power and closed roads while swollen streams slipped their banks, flooding businesses and residences across Western North Carolina.

In a county as old as Haywood, there exist all manner of half-remembered places and faces long gone from the physical world yet immortalized through penciled notes on the backs of dog-eared, sepia-toned photographs.

Sunburst, in southeastern Haywood County, is one of those places; the subject of intense historical research, it’s been documented better than most ghosts of Haywood past, but the story of Sunburst has always been short one chapter. 

It was a struggle from the start — getting in, getting people and supplies up and getting the lumber down — but the mostly-forgotten century-old logging camp now hidden beneath the placid waters of Lake Logan in southeastern Haywood County still casts a long shadow on the area and its inhabitants. 

After nearly 245 years, Haywood County’s Bethel community remains just a small part of a relatively small county, but the impact the Bethel Rural Community Organization’s had on the area in the last 17 years has been anything but. 

Bill Holbrook has been a lot of things in his 71 years on earth — a factory worker, a manager, a father, a husband — but he’s always been a farmer.

“I enjoy getting my hands dirty. I enjoy the challenge,” said Holbrook, who owns Cold Mountain Farms. “I like it better than working on concrete in a factory.”

A cadre of curious animals gathers at the gate as Joe Moore, owner of Indian Springs Farms in Bethel, approaches the pasture. 

“Hello girls,” he says, addressing the herd of bright-eyed, tuft-headed alpacas. As he opens the door, some draw near to sniff his shirt or hands, while others — the shier ones, presumably — hang back to gauge the situation from afar.

By Paul Clark • Correspondent

Harvesting poplar bark to make bark shingles is never easy, but this summer Danny Heatherly and his crew had a short season shortened even further by all the rain that fell.