What started out as a simple idea to open a bottle shop has morphed into a hub of culinary delights and handmade goods in downtown Waynesville. 

The holiday shopping season tends to be a stressful time for shoppers as well as retailers with large crowds, long lines, mounting tension and explosive tempers as everyone is in a rush to get everything on their list. 

For several years, The Smoky Mountain News has partnered with the Haywood Chamber of Commerce to publish its annual magazine. 

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

July 15 was a busy Thursday night at Bogart’s Restaurant  in Sylva. The dining room was full of people and conversation, the kitchen hopping. 

When Dylan Brooks first started his college education, he began in a business program. It didn’t take long to figure out that sitting in a classroom or eventually in an office was not what he wanted to do. 

Like the rest of the world, Sylva has had to grapple with the ongoing Coronavirus Pandemic and the ensuing economic fallout. However, Sylva not only maintained a healthy, downtown business district, it has added new businesses and new elements to the downtown scene throughout the course of the pandemic. 

Bernadette Peters arrived in Western North Carolina in 2011 as a novice in the world of food service and an outsider to the tight-knit Sylva community. 

Planning events during the COVID-19 Pandemic has been no picnic. Just as businesses and agencies make plans for their next festival or fundraiser, the virus takes another unexpected turn. 

As state elected leaders toured areas of Haywood County decimated by deadly flooding that killed six people last week, local agencies were busy assessing damage and compiling reports in support of a federal disaster declaration that would bring badly needed resources.