By Sarah Kucharski • Staff Writer

A lawsuit over deed restrictions that could prevent a controversial high-rise condominium near Highlands from being built is past due for mediation.

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.

By Sarah Kucharski • Staff Writer

As residents in the Cashiers area pull together to address their community’s needs through the creation of a civic association, members of some of the region’s established grassroots groups weighed in on what makes such an organization successful.

By Sarah Kucharski • Staff Writer

Members of the Cashiers area are organizing a new civic association to direct the community’s future.

The formation of the association is an outgrowth of a planning project a group of Louisiana State University students undertook last year. The students, led by LSU landscape architecture professor and part-time Cashiers resident V. Frank Chaffin, studied the area in terms of demographics, land use and projected growth. Their semester-long study resulted in the recommendation of aesthetic-yet-functional element such as the creation of a public park and preserving in-town wetlands.

By Sarah Kucharski • Staff Writer

Approximately 80 workers will be laid off from Cashier’s Consolidated Metco plastics plant beginning in January in the largest downsizing in Jackson County since the Ashley Company furniture plant closed in 2002.