To mark the start of early voting, The Smoky Mountain News will host a pair of free candidate forums in the towns of Canton and Maggie Valley.

Aloha. Aristocrat. Forester. Shasta. Spartan. And of course, Airstream and Winnebago.

To date, most area governments that have heard a brunch bill ordinance have passed one. In other areas like Canton and Sylva, the ordinances still have a fighting chance.

Located amidst the ice cream shops and candy stores in Maggie Valley’s Market Square is a different kind of establishment — Wild Market.

For a while there, things seemed to be pretty quiet on the Maggie Valley political scene, but on the very last day of the candidate filing period three candidates joined two others in seeking the two aldermanic seats up for election this year.

Dave Angel hasn’t wasted any time becoming part of the Maggie Valley community and in return, they’ve welcomed Haywood County’s first distillery with open arms.

Elevated Mountain Distilling Company, located in the former Carolina Nights Dinner Theater building on Soco Road, opened Memorial Day weekend, and has had hundreds of visitors a week ever since. It is the first craft distillery to open in the counties west of Buncombe.

Since announcing its closure after 51 years in business, Joey’s Pancake House owner Brenda O’Keefe and her staff have been bombarded with well wishes and awards, including the highest honor in North Carolina — Order of the Long Leaf Pine.

Haywood County’s 2017 property revaluation was like a bucket of cold water in the face of every local government official in the county, but nowhere more so than Maggie Valley.

Some institutions are meant to last forever, while others have their place in time and then they’re gone. 

After Tuesday, June 13, Joey’s Pancake House in Maggie Valley will be gone.

Opened atop Buck Mountain in 1961, Wild West-themed Ghost Town in the Sky used to draw as many as 600,000 visitors a year to Maggie Valley, but after a combination of maladministration, mechanical difficulties and even a landslide, the park began opening intermittently, and then not at all, leaving a gaping hole in the local tourism economy.