After having their Haywood County home destroyed by three separate floods, Michelle Lee, her husband Roger and their son Cheyenne have found new digs on higher ground. 

The land they had lived on was in the Lee family for generations. Roger’s 71 years have played out on the wooded patch near a normally calm creek that slipped its banks and wreaked havoc on the property three times — in 2004 when Hurricanes Frances and Ivan arrived; in 2021, Fred; and in 2024, Helene. 

The Western Carolina University Fine Art Museum at the John W. Bardo Fine and Performing Arts Center will be broadening the scope of artists represented in its holdings thanks to contributions from a Macon County couple. 

As the recovery from the flooding disaster brought on by Hurricane Helene transitions to a different phase with more long-term priorities, housing solutions have become a major focus of volunteers still looking to lend a helping hand. 

To the Editor:

The Haywood Gleaners wish to express our sincere gratitude to the Mountain Research Station for their recent invitation to glean two of their beautiful fields, one of tomatoes and the other bell peppers.

Kentucky singer-songwriter Dalton Mills will perform at 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19, on the side-lawn stage at Yonder Community Market in Franklin. 

Anyone on the internet knows that it can be a place of negativity and division. But it’s also a powerful tool for connection, and in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Crystal Cochran harnessed that connection to build a community of volunteers that provided vital assistance to thousands in Western North Carolina. 

Dan Messer would have preferred to host a livestock auction on Monday, but instead he was working one in a string of countless dawn-to-midnight days coordinating aid distribution out of the WNC Regional Livestock Center in Canton. 

Let’s not sugarcoat it anymore. To call it “misinformation” is, in itself, misinformation. Let’s just call it what it is — straight-up lies, of the sort that would earn you a whoopin’ by meemaw if you repeated them to her face instead of spreading them from behind a keyboard like a coward. 

Since Tropical Storm Helene hit Western North Carolina, there has been an outpouring of people looking for ways to support those hit hardest by the storm. Here’s a look at what options people have to volunteer or donate if they wish to contribute to ongoing efforts in the Smoky Mountain News coverage area (Swain, Macon, Jackson and Haywood counties, as well as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians).

Already in an affordable housing crisis, Haywood County agencies are now confronted with trying to find emergency housing for families displaced by the devastating floods on Aug. 17.