Though his fingers seemingly wrap around a walking cane more than his trusty banjo these days, Raymond Fairchild remains one of the finest musicians who ever picked up the five-string acoustic instrument — alive or six feet under. 

“I just count myself another mountain picker. I don’t think I’m no better than anybody else, but I think I’m as good as any of’em — that’s the legacy,” Fairchild said with his trademark grin. “When they ask me when I’m going to retire, I say when somebody comes along and beats me at picking the banjo — and they said, ‘you’ll never retire.’” 

Steadfast she stands in a yellow bonnet, wearing the mountain range behind her like a shawl draped upon her blouse of green, one arm clutching the yellow apron atop her red dress and the other outstretched as though waving or beckoning to someone or something unseen off in the distance.

Think about it like this — your buddy owns a factory that makes widgets and he can sell as many widgets to his customers as they want to buy, but your factory makes a slightly different version of that widget and state law prohibits you from selling more than five widgetlets to any customer in any given year. 

After years of fits and starts, Maggie Valley’s unified development ordinance is finally about to see the light of day, and town officials are hoping for as much public input as possible to ensure a smooth transition.

Municipal budget season is well underway, and in at least one Haywood County town, the discussion isn’t about rising costs or decreasing revenue — it’s about what to do with a burgeoning balance sheet.

What was hoped to be a slick new attraction designed to bring more visitors to Maggie Valley during wintertime has instead been shown to be an attraction of a different sort — a magic trick that turned $36,268 of taxpayer money into just $4,338 of ticket sales.

Haywood County’s five local governments more or less fall into two tiers — there’s the county and there’s Waynesville, and then there’s everybody else. 

A new extravaganza will prance into the Maggie Valley Festival Grounds this year — the Smoky Mountain Elk Fest, an event years in the making designed to offer education and celebration of all things elk and of the outdoors in general. 

“It’s actually been talked about for at least four years, and there have been several meetings where all the state agencies and regional agencies have come together and talked about it,” said Lynn Collins, executive director of the Haywood County Tourism Development Authority. “It was just a situation where there wasn’t anybody that would step up and spearhead it.”

It’s a perplexing dichotomy. Maggie Valley has been portrayed as a town that rolls up the sidewalks once the leaf-lookers leave each fall, even though it’s home to two popular winter attractions — Cataloochee Ski Resort and Tony’s Tube World draw thousands each year to the western end of Haywood County — but now a third reason to visit the Valley will further test tourists’ appetite for winter wanderings.

On Jan. 15, The Smoky Mountain News contacted almost every elected official in Haywood County for whom an email address was listed with the county’s board of elections. Around half failed to respond, but those who did were sometimes too verbose for print, so an excerpt from their response was used in the Jan. 23 edition of The Smoky Mountain News. In the interest of transparency, their full responses are included here.