Where Small Business is Big Business: An hour southwest of Asheville, two adjoining North Carolina towns have earned themselves a string of “firsts” and “onlys.”
Standing on the hill outside the Jackson County Library, you can see the length of Sylva’s Main Street. It’s a cold and rainy Saturday morning, more suited to sitting by a fire than being out and about.
But traffic on Main Street is nonstop, and most of the parking places are taken. People have business here in this downtown—in stores that include a chocolate shop, a river outfitter, restaurants and coffee shops, a fresh fish market, several breweries, antique and resale shops, a baby store and a cocktail lounge.
And three bookstores. Someone’s doing a lot of reading in Sylva, population 2,269.
The night before, I’d made three loops around the large community parking area of neighboring Dillsboro (population 232) before finding a place to park for the Lights and Luminaries celebration, complete with horse-drawn carriage and a couple dozen shops serving hot cider and selling crafts…as well as a newly opened brewery in the old train station and adjacent farm-to-table restaurant.
As if thriving business districts weren’t enough, the Sylva/Dillsboro area has laid claim to some notable accolades:
- The most photographed library in North Carolina
- The first “live” museum dedicated to the history of women in Southern Appalachia
- The only fly fishing trail—complete with waterproof map—in America
- The largest collection of American Housecat memorabilia in one of only two house cat museums in America
- The only blacksmith and metalcraft studios and one of only two glass art studios fueled by methane gas from a capped landfill
What’s the secret in Jackson County, pressed up close to Great Smoky Mountain National Park, far from population hubs and devoid of industry (unless you count a former paper mill that now recycles cardboard)? Why are there more businesses opening than closing on their main streets?
“We’ve always been tourist-driven,” says Jackson County Director of Economic Development Rich Price. “And we have increasing numbers of retirees and second-home residents coming. What we’ve done well here is create a very strong small business economy to serve them.
“We’ve done that with a lot of help from our local colleges, Southwestern Community College (SCC) and Western Carolina University. General Motors is not going to call and say they want to put a large manufacturing plant here. But if they did, our schools could have people trained for those jobs immediately.”
“Development of our area is deeply rooted in our community mission,” says Dr. Don Tomas, president of Southwestern Community College. “We want to stay ahead of the curve—not be in the middle of it. We can’t rest on our laurels.”
SCC Vice President Thom Brooks points to three examples of how the school has looked ahead to predict and train workers.
- SCC has 14 health sciences programs turning out graduates for the area’s clinics and hospitals. A new Health Sciences Building is under construction—50 percent of the cost funded by Jackson County. The result? Retirees can come here knowing they’ll have good health care.
- The Small Business Center trained 200 small business employees in the past year. The result? Skilled business staff and entrepreneurs in an area dependent on small retail and food establishments.
- Basic Law Enforcement students can now receive training for fulltime employment by the National Park Service—training which previously required travel to Georgia. The result? Trail safety for the many mountain bikers and hikers in the area.
It’s that kind of close attention to local needs—and the resulting partnerships among local government, business leaders, and educational institutions to fill them—that make small, faraway towns like Dillsboro and Sylva flourish.
Exactly what James and Deborah Fallows, in their recent book “Our Towns,” cite as a mark of successful towns. In their travels across America, they found that the towns moving forward now are those in which “people work together on practical local possibilities,” where the phrase “public-private partnership” refers to “something real.” And where “they have, and care about, a community college.”
So go see Sylva and Dillsboro and surrounding Jackson County. They’ve done it right, focusing on what is rather than what was. They’re towns where you can disappear—and yet find enough to see and do and buy to make the drive well worth it. They’re safe towns, where people talk about books and bicycles and the movies they see while eating dinner at Mad Batter Food and Film. You can see the gift shop where five scenes of “Five Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” were filmed (and it’s currently for sale by its retiring owners!). You can hike Pinnacle Peak for a 360-degree view of the surrounding mountains.
Or you can stand on the historic library steps and look at Main Street, and feel glad that in a time when small towns in Appalachia are struggling, you’re in one that has three bookstores.
END OF PREVIEW
The story above appears in our March/April 2019 issue.
