Canton, North Carolina, Paper Mill Town

Canton, in Haywood County at the headwaters of the Pigeon River, was a tiny mountain community of barely two hundred people in nineteen oh five when industrialist Peter Thomson arrived and bought a mill site along with twenty-five thousand acres of spruce-covered mountainside. Construction began in nineteen oh six, and by January of nineteen oh eight the Champion Fibre Company pulp mill was in full operation. The mill transformed Canton completely: by nineteen thirty the population had grown to more than five thousand, its peak for that era.

It also transformed the Pigeon River, which ran dark with dye and sulfite waste for decades, a source of legal battles between North Carolina and downstream Tennessee communities that lasted into the nineteen nineties. The mill, under various owners, ran for over a century and defined what it meant to be from Canton.