As technology evolves, every entity and industry finds new and innovative ways to use those advances to improve their operations.

Editor’s Note: Since first rolling into Haywood County in August 2012 to start work as the arts and entertainment editor for The Smoky Mountain News, Garret K. Woodward has been extensively documenting banjo players around our backyard.

In the mid-1960s, when Bill Allsbrook was a med school student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, he decided to pick up the banjo. 

It’s novel, it’s trendy and it’s a great way to become fabulously wealthy — or lose everything you have — but the nuisances associated with the production of cryptocurrency are prompting local governments to regulate them before it’s too late. 

It’s been just under a year since Bill Wilke became Haywood County’s sheriff, after longtime popular incumbent, Greg Christopher, decided to call it a career.

Fears that North Carolina’s new voter ID implementation would disenfranchise legitimate voters have proven unfounded — at least in Haywood County, where municipal election turnout was stronger than usual. 

Environmental groups working to improve water quality in Haywood, Buncombe and Madison counties recently received 10 grants totaling $285,190 from The Pigeon River Fund of The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina. 

More than two years after deadly flooding killed six people and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to public and private property from Bethel to Cruso to Canton to Clyde, Haywood County will purchase an early warning siren system to keep residents better informed for when — not if — it happens again. 

After 17 years, one of the most beloved triathlons in the southeast has crossed the finish line.

Town elections are seldom exciting, but the race in Waynesville is generating a lot of buzz.