Mill workers at Blue Ridge Paper Products are optimistic about their future under a new owner.

The buyer, a billionaire from New Zealand named Graeme Hart, has been gobbling up market share in the milk and juice carton industry over the past 18 months. His company, the Rank Group, has grown to the world’s second-largest maker of cardboard drink cartons. Hart has spent more than $5 billion on his forays.

By Julia Merchant • Staff Writer

In the end, the acquisition of Blue Ridge Paper Products by the New Zealand-based Rank Group for $338 million last week may have been the result of the purchase of a single factory in tiny Pine Bluff, Ark.

By Sarah Kucharski — Staff Writer

John Anderson’s boisterous voice streams out from the computer speakers.

The month-long celebration of Canton’s centennial Labor Day festival, which had much to offer, wasn’t really about organized labor. Now that the feel-good readings, concerts and historical affairs have passed, though, it’s a good time consider the history of organized labor in this country, ponder its pending demise and try to figure out how workers will fare in the future as U.S. industry undergoes a tidal wave of changing responsibilities.

1893 — The town of Pigeon River is reincorporated by the N.C. General Assembly as Canton, N.C.

By Patrick Willis • Guest Writer

Just more than 100 years ago, Canton welcomed a man from Ohio who would change the town’s history forever.

In early 1905, an industrialist named Peter G. Thomson decided to visit Western North Carolina with the hopes of building a pulp mill and extract plant to supply his paper factories in Ohio. Thomson knew vast timber in the Southern Appalachian Mountains would greatly benefit his business.

By Michael Beadle

Phil Smathers still vividly recalls those Saturdays as a kid when 25 cents bought a hot dog, sucker and a movie at the Colonial Theatre. He’d be there all day with his friends watching the latest Buck Rogers adventures, old cowboy Westerns, and exotic stories about Sinbad.

When the Rev. Beverly Brock of Canton was diagnosed with cancer, doctors immediately offered her a high percentage cure. Most people would leap at such an option, but to Brock, the cure seemed much worse than the disease.

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.

By Michael Beadle

Laura Boosinger was a student at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa in the late 1970s when she decided to take a banjo class for a college credit.