Advertisement

In one Western NC town, high school football and a stadium represent recovery, resolve

Pisgah Memorial Stadium sits along the edge of the Pigeon River in an idyllic pocket of Haywood County in Western North Carolina — rolling mountain hills all around; Canton’s Main Street a short walk away; the old paper mill practically next door.

There is no better setting for high school football in all of North Carolina and maybe all of the United States, outside of Texas, and when the Pisgah High Black Bears enter the place, and that old mill whistle blares at kickoff, well, it’s a sight.

It’s a feeling, a point of pride, that’s part of what binds people together in this little town of 4,400 nestled in the mountains about 20 miles west of Asheville.

Friday nights are different in Canton the way they’re different in any small town where high school football is at the foundation of community. The Bears routinely draw thousands of spectators for their home games at Memorial Stadium, and the entire scene is something straight out of a mid-century Rockwell painting. There’s the mill, just across the river. A quaint downtown just up the hill.

Jody Mathis holds a photo of the football team with the paper mill in the background at Pisgah High School in Canton, N.C. on Tuesday, October 8, 2024.
Jody Mathis holds a photo of the football team with the paper mill in the background at Pisgah High School in Canton, N.C. on Tuesday, October 8, 2024.

There are the humble concrete bleachers rising next to the river, and stone memorials to the high school boys who went off to World War II, and never came home. There’s the stadium where the Bears won four state championships in the 1960s and ‘70s, where generations of children grew up going to games and then, in turn, where they brought their children; where some supporters have sat in the same seats for decades, year after year and Friday night after autumn Friday night.

For a long time everyone around here had been looking forward to the biggest home game of the season, against Tuscola High. In a county with two main public high schools, the Pisgah-Tuscola football game is the most important sporting event around. It’s without question the fiercest high school football rivalry in the state; an annual spectacle that divides the county. At Memorial Stadium the locals were expecting as many as 12,000 people, and something like bedlam.

Part of the anticipation was the normal build-up for a rivalry that never ebbs. Another part of it, though, was that Pisgah didn’t have a chance to host the last time it was supposed to, back in 2022. Memorial Stadium then was still undergoing repair from the flooding it sustained during Tropical Storm Fred the previous fall, when the Pigeon River swelled and covered the field.

The game this year, then, was going to mean even more than usual. The whistle was going to sound again at Memorial Stadium, as kickoff approached against Tuscola. Fans were going to pour in again from nearby Main Street and from all over Haywood County. The Black Bears, wearing their jerseys with “Mill Town” written across the front, were again going to parade into Memorial Stadium, with more than 10,000 gathered and waiting to see it all. It was going to be momentous.

And then came Helene.

Jody Mathis sits in the stands of the football stadium that was flooded during hurricane Helene at Pisgah High School in Canton, N.C. on Tuesday, October 8, 2024.
Jody Mathis sits in the stands of the football stadium that was flooded during hurricane Helene at Pisgah High School in Canton, N.C. on Tuesday, October 8, 2024.

Destruction ... and resolve

Amid all the other devastation Helene wrought throughout Western North Carolina — in Asheville and Marshall and Swannanoa; in Chimney Rock and along Lake Lure and near Burnsville and Spruce Pine and in the tucked-away places where they’re still measuring the toll — images and videos began emerging from Canton, too, the day of a region’s worst storm in more than a century.

They showed Memorial Stadium, a community’s most beloved place, under water. They showed the Pigeon River, rising and roaring again, the field goal posts poking out of the flooding, two ghostly apparitions fading in the gray haze of the downpour and wind and quickly rising water. Many parts of Haywood County were spared during Helene. Canton was not among them.

When the Pigeon River receded, after days, it left behind a familiar scene of carnage. This was the fourth time in the past 20 years that a flood filled Memorial Stadium. The water toppled the fencing surrounding the field. It pushed those goal posts askew.

It covered all but a few rows of the visitors’ side bleachers. It flooded out the concession stands, washing away some of what had been inside and turning over what remained. It covered more than a dozen rows of stands behind the home sideline. It poured over the Bears’ turf field.

A mud covered sink in Pisgah Memorial Stadium on Friday, October 18, 2024 in Canton, N.C. The stadium has been closed since Hurricane Helene pushed the Pigeon River into the stadium, with water levels reaching the cross-bars on each goal post.
A mud covered sink in Pisgah Memorial Stadium on Friday, October 18, 2024 in Canton, N.C. The stadium has been closed since Hurricane Helene pushed the Pigeon River into the stadium, with water levels reaching the cross-bars on each goal post.

It left behind a thick layer of muck and mud and endless debris, things that had been swept away from storefronts and houses. Downtown Canton was ruined. Soon, people’s belongings covered front yards along nearby streets. At the stadium the stone war memorials, inscribed with names and rank and years of death — for Corporal R.H. Robertson and Private L.J. Trantham and First Lieutenant L.M. White, among several others — seemed to be the only things left untouched. They stood sentry behind one of the end zones, witnesses to the destruction — but also to the resolve.

Because there was resolve. And fight. And the will to start over, again.

As quickly as the water receded at Pisgah Memorial Stadium, the clean-up began. And then came the hope — a kernel, at first, that grew. A sense of belief that, yes, maybe what looked impossible in the days after Helene might prove realistic, after all. That maybe Memorial Stadium could be ready in time for the end of the season. Ready for the Tuscola game. That maybe that whistle would howl again at home, and sooner than anyone could have imagined.

Contractors continue their clean-up of Pisgah Memorial Stadium on Friday, October 18, 2024 in Canton, N.C. The stadium has been closed since historic flooding from Hurricane Helene, three weeks ago.
Contractors continue their clean-up of Pisgah Memorial Stadium on Friday, October 18, 2024 in Canton, N.C. The stadium has been closed since historic flooding from Hurricane Helene, three weeks ago.

That old whistle ‘gives me chill bumps’

The whistle that blares at Pisgah home games is the same whistle that long sounded at the Pactiv Evergreen paper mill, which for decades was Canton’s largest employer and economic engine. It closed in May 2023, after more than a century, and starting at noon on its final day that whistle roared for five straight minutes. It was part tribute, and part dying breath.

Upon its final note, several minutes of silence followed. And then, after that, church bells in Canton chimed 115 times, in honor of the mill’s 115 years of operation. For decades, the mill whistle has been a part of the soundtrack of Friday nights in Canton, along with the pep band and the pop of helmets and pads and the rhythmic shouts of the cheerleaders.

Pisgah football games used to start with a call from the stadium to the mill, a countdown of sorts.

“They would be on the phone with the people that were working at the time, that couldn’t be at the game,” said Pisgah head coach Ricky Brindley, who grew up going to games there and later played football at the school. “And they would blow the whistle, from the mill.”

An aerial view of the Pisgah High football field in Canton on Saturday, Oct. 19, 2024. The field was flooded in 2021 by Tropical Storm Fred and again in September 2024 by Tropical Storm Helene.
An aerial view of the Pisgah High football field in Canton on Saturday, Oct. 19, 2024. The field was flooded in 2021 by Tropical Storm Fred and again in September 2024 by Tropical Storm Helene.

Soon after the mill shut down almost 18 months ago, the whistle found new life. Workers installed it at Memorial Stadium. Just the sound of it, said Rhonda Byrd, a 1981 Pisgah High graduate who has kept the football team’s stats for the past 16 years, “gives me chill bumps.”

“The true whistle from that mill when they shut it down is at that stadium,” she said, “and the beginning of every game, we blow that whistle. And that’s a reminder of all the people that used to work down there when they closed it.

“And it’s a blue collar town and these kids right here,” she said of Pisgah’s players, “bring that same kind of attitude. They bring a hard work attitude. And this town, there’s nothing going to stop us. We’re going to keep coming back.

“We’re going to keep coming back,” she said again and, once more, “we’re going to keep coming back. God can do what He wants to with these storms. These people are going to still fight back.”

Pisgah High School football players adopted ‘Toughness’ as their motivational slogan prior to the start of the season. The word has taken on special meaning as some team members deal with the loss of their homes in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
Pisgah High School football players adopted ‘Toughness’ as their motivational slogan prior to the start of the season. The word has taken on special meaning as some team members deal with the loss of their homes in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

‘Who we are’

She was speaking in the moments after Pisgah’s first game back after Helene. It came two weeks after, at Bethel Middle School, where there was no charge for admission or concessions — just big white buckets set up directing people to deposit cash for relief efforts throughout Western Carolina. Remnants of the destruction were pretty much everywhere.

Along the winding and quiet two-lane road to Bethel Middle, perched on higher ground, piles of belongings from flooded-out homes sat next to driveways and mailboxes. As was the case throughout the mountains, a person’s plight depended on their proximity to a river or stream or creek, or whether they lived on or near a slope prone to landslides.

In the days after the storm, once the phones started working again, Brindley and his players helped neighbors and their communities clean up. Brindley and most of his players made it out OK from Helene; they were lucky. Two of his players, though, lost their homes. One of them, Carson Riley, said he felt like he’d been living in a “fever dream.”

Days before that first game back, he said, he and his family received the news:

Their home, he said, “was a total loss.”

He’d moved in with his grandmother. His teammates, meanwhile, had been by his house to help rescue what could be rescued, and to help carry out the rest.

“I can never thank them enough,” said Riley, a sophomore. “I don’t have the words for it.”

The Pisgah High School football team runs an offensive set during practice on Wednesday, October 16, 2024 in Canton, N.C. Two of the team’s players lost their homes during Hurricane Helene. The team lost its home field, Pisgah Memorial Stadium from Pigeon River flooding.
The Pisgah High School football team runs an offensive set during practice on Wednesday, October 16, 2024 in Canton, N.C. Two of the team’s players lost their homes during Hurricane Helene. The team lost its home field, Pisgah Memorial Stadium from Pigeon River flooding.

Football, at least, gave him something else to think about. A game gave him something to look forward to, if only momentarily. He and his teammates boarded a bus and made the short ride to the middle school. They changed in an auxiliary gym. They strapped on helmets with “toughness” written on the back, and they wore their familiar jerseys with “Mill Town” on the front.

That the mill had closed didn’t matter. Mill Town remained, nonetheless — the physical structure, yes, but more important what the place always represented.

“That’s who we are,” Brindley said, and yet he conceded that when it shut down “we lost a little bit of who we are when we lost that mill.” It was the same thing when the community lost Memorial Stadium to flooding in 2021, which kept Pisgah off its home field for the entirety of the 2022 season.

“You want to cling to who you are,” Brindley said. “And I think this community, that’s who we are.

“We’re a mill town.”

‘We always find a way back’

Five of his assistant coaches worked at that mill, some of them part of generations of the same family who worked there. Jody Mathis, the Bears’ stout and sturdy defensive ends coach, was among them. For 23 years he managed inventory and logistics and the warehouse.

“Everything you can think of” at the mill, he said, “other than running a paper machine.”

Mathis’ father worked there, too. And his grandfather. And his great-grandfather.

And amid all the flooding in Canton, and amid the closure of that mill, Mathis, 51, has come to appreciate a certain kind of resiliency. During the hard times, he said he has sometimes sensed doubt from outsiders — a skepticism about a town’s ability to rally; an attitude from people who don’t understand what Canton is about that “you’ll never come back.”

“And you don’t tell us that, man,” Mathis said. “That’s just gonna fuel the fire. We always find a way back. And we will here, too.”

Jody Mathis coaches football at Pisgah High School in Canton, N.C. on Tuesday, October 8, 2024.
Jody Mathis coaches football at Pisgah High School in Canton, N.C. on Tuesday, October 8, 2024.

Undoubtedly, that has been part of the motivation in the rush to prepare Memorial Stadium for the regular season finale against Tuscola. Part of it is the need to rebuild an essential gathering place for a wounded community. But another part of it is that it’s hard, and that doing hard things is a part of people’s identity throughout a lot of the mountains, but especially in Canton.

Not long ago, it looked like there was no chance the Bears would be back in their stadium any time soon. Even after crews had the field mostly cleared after a couple of weeks, there were still the piles of mud everywhere and the sediment and debris deposits in the stands; the ruined fences and the washed-away protective padding and the concession stands that looked like a demolition zone.

Pisgah High School football coach Ricky Brindley works with his team during practice on Wednesday, October 16, 2024 in Canton, N.C. Two of the team’s players lost their homes during Hurricane Helene. The team lost its home field, Pisgah Memorial Stadium from Pigeon River flooding.
Pisgah High School football coach Ricky Brindley works with his team during practice on Wednesday, October 16, 2024 in Canton, N.C. Two of the team’s players lost their homes during Hurricane Helene. The team lost its home field, Pisgah Memorial Stadium from Pigeon River flooding.

Just last week, though, the field was “in pristine playing condition,” Brindley said. And just last week, said Heidi Morgan, the Pisgah High athletics director, everything else was looking pretty good, too — “just a few small steps” away from final approval to host Tuscola on Friday night; about “85 to 90 percent there.”

It was something like a small mountain miracle, in a place in need of endless miracles. AstroTurf, which installed Pisgah’s field, brought in machines to suck out the mud and the dirt and sanitize the playing surface. A local company came in and rebuilt the fencing. The stands were power washed, the padding reinstalled, the concession stands rebuilt.

After the flooding of 2021, it took more than two years for Memorial Stadium to reopen. The flooding that year left the field a mess: torn apart in some places and bunched up in others; the entirety of it in need of massive repair. Helene, for all the catastrophe it left behind, at least left the field intact this time, albeit under water and covered in muck.

Contractors continue their clean-up of Pisgah Memorial Stadium on Friday, October 18, 2024 in Canton, N.C. The stadium has been closed since historic flooding from Hurricane Helene pushed the Pigeon River into the stadium.
Contractors continue their clean-up of Pisgah Memorial Stadium on Friday, October 18, 2024 in Canton, N.C. The stadium has been closed since historic flooding from Hurricane Helene pushed the Pigeon River into the stadium.

“I’m not going to say that I wasn’t skeptical,” Morgan said of the possibility that the stadium could be ready in time for the game against Tuscola. Indeed, she said, she was a “pessimist.” Gradually, though, a dim sense of hope turned into optimism, which turned into the reality that the clean-up was progressing faster than anyone could’ve envisioned.

Still, she said, “I feel almost guilty” about it all.

No. She corrected herself.

“I do feel guilty,” she said, listing off places like Swannanoa and Chimney Rock and Black Mountain — places that were “absolutely devastated.”

“So many lives were lost during this flood,” she said, but she knew her town had been hurting, too, what with the flood of ‘21 and the mill closure and then everything that came during Helene, which left Canton and Clyde, another small Haywood County town, underwater and reeling.

An aerial view of the Pisgah High football field in Canton on Saturday, Oct. 19, 2024. The field was flooded in 2021 by Tropical Storm Fred and again in September 2024 by Tropical Storm Helene.
An aerial view of the Pisgah High football field in Canton on Saturday, Oct. 19, 2024. The field was flooded in 2021 by Tropical Storm Fred and again in September 2024 by Tropical Storm Helene.

‘Back at home’

If Memorial Stadium could be ready in time for the biggest game around, maybe that could be something. If more than 10,000 people could come out for Pisgah-Tuscola, maybe it’d help provide some normalcy in these most abnormal times throughout Western North Carolina.

If that old whistle could sound at kickoff again, maybe it’d be one small victory after so much loss.

For weeks, crews of workers and county officials cleaned everything. Slowly, a place that had been caked in mud and covered in debris began to transform. The turf field went from a hazy brown back to its rightful bright green. The stands were washed out by floodwater were pressure washed and ready.

Maintenance workers rebuilt and repaired the infrastructure. County inspectors visited Pisgah Memorial Stadium earlier this week. It’d come a long way.

Then, Tuesday, the decision: It was a go.

The Black Bears, forced out of their stadium for more than a month, will host Tuscola on Friday night. There might be 12,000 people there to see it. Pisgah High’s seniors will have their moment.

A healing town will come together.

The whistle will roar once again.

Upon hearing the news, Morgan, the athletic director, described it like this: “We are back at home.”