The Pigeon Community Multicultural Development Center in Waynesville has recently announced its 2025 “Pigeon Community Conversations with Storytellers Series.” 

To The Editor:

I appreciate your straightforward and informative coverage of the removal of the plaque over Sylva Sam’s Confederate flag. I am a 21-year resident of Jackson County, and have enjoyed positive relations with fellow citizens here during all those years, no matter what our political views were.  

In a town where history lives not just in the pages of books but on every brick-lined sidewalk, beneath every gabled rooftop and deep within every stately mansion, Waynesville’s Historic Preservation Commission is stepping boldly into the future by leaning into a past that, for many locals, hasn’t yet passed. 

You’re about to start hearing a lot about the number 250, if you haven’t already. Over the next 15 months, two important historic anniversaries will take place, one statewide and the other nationwide. 

Several weeks ago, I published an article that dealt with a trip to Tellico Plains with the Principal Chief of the Cherokees, John Crowe. This was back in 1976 and the Tennessee Valley Authority had announced their plans to flood the Tellico Plains.

On the morning of April 8, county employees removed commemorative plaques from the Confederate statue outside the Jackson County Library and placed them in the county’s storage facility. Few in the county, save the board of commissioners, knew the possibility of removal was even on the table. 

This one is for my old friends, living and dead, in Cherokee. Here’s to you, Trigger Young, Woody Sneed, Bill Young, Darlene Whitetree, Homer Burgess, Wanda Lee Burgess, Darlene Bradley, Ralph Henry, Jean Holt, Ethelene Conseen, Johnson Catoaster, Johnson Lee Owle, Eddie Swimmer Wilber Paul and a hundred others. 

In the early 1900s, in Tsarist Russia, young intellectuals with means would study philosophy and history. Some would feel a longing for their country to become more modern, to become a nation under the rule of law, as other nations in the world had done. 

North Carolina lawmakers are stepping into the ring with a $500,000 proposal to grapple with the idea of establishing a professional wrestling museum, hoping to pin down the state’s rich sports entertainment history before the final bell rings on funding. 

Having grown up in proximity to a Cherokee community (Little Snowbird in Graham County), I’m familiar with and sensitive to the history and the psychology of Native peoples who have been marginalized and worse from their cultural roots and their homelands.