History in the Making
History rarely looks particularly historic when you're the one looking for another folding table or breaking gound for a new loo.
Jackson County is 175. We have stories to tell.
I've spent a good deal of the summer looking backward, rummaging through Jackson County's 175 years of history, studying old maps, following roads that no longer go where they once did, and wondering about the people whose names have survived in church records, family stories, and the occasional faded photograph. And then there are all the others, the people who surely had just as much to do with making this place what it became, whose names have slipped away somewhere between one generation and the next.
Darius Rucker has a song called History in the Making, and I've always liked the thought behind it, that you might be living through a moment you'll remember for the rest of your life without quite realizing it at the time. Of course, he was singing about romance, which is considerably more appealing than trying to find enough extension cords for a dozen pots of chili, but I think the principle holds. Meanwhile, history has been going about its business right under my nose.
On Monday, we broke ground on new public restrooms at The Village Green in Cashiers. Out with the old, in with the loo! Even the most practical improvements become part of a place's history.
This evening we'll gather for the twentieth annual Chili Cook-Off, where people will spend a couple of hours tasting chili, comparing recipes, catching up with neighbors, and expressing surprisingly strong opinions about what does or does not belong in a respectable pot of beans. I don't suppose either occasion will find its way into a history textbook, although twenty years of chili ought to be worth at least a footnote.
Sam Lupas of Landmark Realty Group started the Chili Cook-Off as a way to thank the clients and community who had supported the business throughout the season. A nice idea, really, to gather everyone for a little food and friendly competition before Cashiers settled into its quieter winter months.
I wonder whether Sam had any notion that twenty years later we'd still be at it, only now the cook-off has become the Chamber's Business After Hours fall finale, with Landmark and the Chamber working together to keep it going.
Perhaps he did. I'll have to ask him tonight.
I've been involved in enough community events to know that somebody had to organize that first cook-off, persuade people to bring their chili, figure out where everyone would stand, hope they had enough extension cords and crock pots, and and pray enough folks showed up to make the whole thing worthwhile. There were probably a few last-minute surprises, because there always are, and when it was all over, somebody must have thought it was worth doing again.
And here we are, twenty years later.
That's the part I find myself thinking about. Somewhere along the way, an idea that might have lasted one afternoon became something people started looking forward to, then planning around, and eventually a fixture on our community calendar. And unlike some traditions whose beginnings have faded from memory, we can still trace this one back to Sam and his team setting up tents on the plot of land between Landmark and where the Ugly Dog now stands.
I remember when Sweet Treats was there, and I remember at least one year showing up to support my friend April Mattox and her chili creation, back behind what is now Landmark Rentals at the crossroads. Funny how you can remember a place by what used to be there, even while you're standing in front of what's there now.
, the Village Pantry of Cashiers, adding their own chapter to a twenty-year Cashiers tradition.
Our Cashiers Christmas Parade is preparing for its fifty-second year, and I sometimes wonder how many people who stood along the roadside waiting for Santa when they were little are now bringing their grandchildren to do exactly the same thing. Fifty-two years of floats decorated in parking lots, marching bands trying to keep their fingers warm, and children waving at Santa with the absolute conviction that he's waving back at them personally.
Sandy Smith's vision of creating the Cashiers Peppermint Stick Parade is still with us, although I wonder whether Sandy could have imagined just how many Christmas memories would grow out of that original idea.
For longer than I can count, Pastor Ralph Campbell of Glenville Wesleyan Church has been our Santa, with Allyson Mulkey beside him as Mrs. Claus. Somewhere in the family albums scattered across Cashiers Valley, there must be photographs of those two with children who have since grown up, moved away, come home, married, and perhaps returned with children of their own.
I'd love to put a few of those photographs side by side.
And Allyson, as it happens, has been busy helping make another Christmas tradition.
A few years ago, Michael Cox had an idea about filling Cashiers with music during the Twelve Days of Christmas. He recruited Thomas at the Chamber, then Allyson and me, to help bring it to life, and here we are, approaching our fourth Christmas season, with more people joining in and more music finding its way into December.
This week, while I was sitting here writing about how ordinary ideas eventually become traditions, the telephone rang. A writer from The Laurel wanted to talk about the Twelve Days of Christmas. And VisitNC has been asking about it, too. I can just imagine Michael and Allyson reading that and coming up with three more ideas before we put the final touches on this year's schedule.
I told the writer we've had Santa and Mrs. Claus parading through Cashiers for more than fifty years, so why shouldn't we have a soundtrack?
Cashiers Burger Week has followed its own rather delicious path, although I must confess we may have underestimated just how seriously people would take the assignment.
We encouraged everyone to visit participating restaurants, try the burgers, and vote for their favorites, and people loved it. Perhaps a little too much, because ten burgers in one week is a considerable amount of beef, even with a burger buddy, for somebody with a healthy appetite and a strong sense of civic duty. So last year I introduced Cashiers Burger Week: The Extended Cut, giving everyone a little more time to make the rounds, revisit a favorite, or recover sufficiently between burgers to appreciate the next one. I like to think of the Extended Cut as a public service.
Now, I realize that a chili cook-off, a Christmas parade, a music series, and a burger competition may not sound like particularly weighty subjects when we're talking about 175 years of county history, especially when you consider everything that has happened here since 1851. But I've been spending a lot of time with old records lately, and the more I read, the more I find myself wondering about the things that never made it into them.
We have courthouse documents, newspaper clippings, photographs carefully labeled on the back, and minutes from meetings where people made decisions that would shape the communities we know today. What we don't always have are the conversations that happened before those meetings, or the names of the people who stayed late afterward, made the extra telephone calls, set up another table because somebody had miscounted, or talked a reluctant neighbor into helping when that neighbor was quite certain nobody would be interested.
I keep thinking about the conversations that must have taken place in kitchens, across desks, or beside pickup trucks, when somebody said, "What if we tried this?" and somebody else, perhaps without fully appreciating what they were agreeing to, said, "Well, why not?"
And then there were the people living here in 1851, who had no idea that one day somebody would be celebrating Jackson County's 175th birthday and poking around in their affairs. They were raising children, tending farms, building homes, opening businesses, arguing about roads, and trying to get through the day with enough time left to eat supper.
I wonder what they would think of us, and whether they'd recognize anything of themselves in the way we go about our lives now.
I'd like to think they would.
By the end of this week, there will be photographs of the groundbreaking at The Village Green and more of people gathered around steaming pots of chili, some of them returning for the twentieth year and others discovering the event for the first time. By December, another Christmas parade booklet will have been printed, another collection of names and businesses and photographs that somebody may someday find tucked into a drawer. And twenty-five years from now, when Jackson County celebrates its 200th birthday, I wonder what people will make of all this.
Perhaps someone will find a photograph of Sam Lupas at an early Chili Cook-Off and wonder how it began. Perhaps a grown child will recognize Pastor Ralph and Allyson in an old parade picture, or someone will come across a program from the first Twelve Days of Christmas and remember the music that filled a December evening. Perhaps they'll find a Burger Week ballot and wonder why on earth we thought anyone could eat ten burgers in seven days.
I hope they find the names, and the photographs, and at least a few of the stories. There's a good chance the people who made it all happen were too busy doing the work to give much thought to whether anybody would remember.
As for me, there's a Chili Crew to help, another cook-off to serve up, and somewhere there's a table that still needs to find its legs.
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