To the Editor:

This letter is in response to LeRoy E. Cossette’s letter stating how bad a Harris presidency would be for the United States, dangerous even, since he (incorrectly) states she is a Marxist socialist. 

AGAIN. For the second time in three years, Haywood County, the highest east of the Mississippi River, experienced devastating flooding from a tropical weather system that reached mountainous Southern Appalachia’s narrow, rocky canyons and broad, lush river valleys — wiping out whole towns, inundating normally impregnable areas and crippling the communications and transportation infrastructure that powers public safety, commerce and the dissemination of information. 

As state elected leaders toured areas of Haywood County decimated by deadly flooding that killed six people last week, local agencies were busy assessing damage and compiling reports in support of a federal disaster declaration that would bring badly needed resources. 

As The Smoky Mountain News went to print Tuesday, a potentially catastrophic storm was barreling down on the Carolinas, with North Carolina poised to bear the brunt of it. 

It was April 5, 1936, Palm Sunday, about nine o’clock in the evening. People were tidying up their kitchens, strolling home from church services, sitting in the local movie theaters, listening to their radios, talking to their neighbors. Just another ordinary spring evening. 

Close your eyes and imagine this: It’s another picture-perfect Western North Carolina Wednesday morning with Chamber of Commerce weather and nary a cloud in the sky.

An incident at a farm facility in Macon County last week left one worker dead and caused the hospitalization of more than a dozen people.

Editor’s note: Marie Cochran attended the production of the “Liar’s Bench” on June 20 at the Mountain Heritage Center on the WCU campus and wrote this review for The Smoky Mountain News.

I am very familiar with the term “the Liars Bench” in its practice of casual storytelling among Southern men sitting in the courthouse square and at barbershops; yet I was skeptical to hear this lighthearted phrase associated with the account of 19 Black men who drowned on a chain gang only decades after the Civil War.

As a disclaimer, for the last month I’ve been a witness to the assemblage of information and a participant in debates that raged about the proper way to engage a diverse audience. Yet, I waited like every other audience member wondering whether “Tears in the Rain” would be told as a gruesome ghost story, a sorrowful tale of faceless men who perished in an unfortunate accident, or an insightful portrayal of a human tragedy.

Charged with stealing, 15-year-old Charles Eason was sentenced to work on a prison chain gang.

It was 1882, and the teenager from Martin County soon found himself side-by-side with other convicts, many two and three times his age. Mostly from the eastern part of the state, the gang was sent to construct the railroad lines in Western North Carolina.

Will it be a bomb, an oil shortage, energy grid damage or an electromagnetic pulse that renders America’s modern modes of transportation useless?

Or will it be the collapse of modern society or simply the collapse of your bank account under the pressure of mounting fuel costs that removes the option of driving a car from the transportation equation?