Champion Magazine

This 38-page publication titled Champion Magazine was created in 1981 and is issue number 9. The magazine examines the impact that the Carolina Division of Champion Paper and Fibre Company had on the region, its economy, its folkways and its people since its founding in 1906 and includes a variety of articles and photographs.
==:o::-::--- NUMBER 9 -----------j( , The Champion Magazine ,) f------------------,,..A--=c=-=E--1:- r Seventy-five years in Carolina. It w-as in 1906 that Peter G. Tho111son arrived in North Carolina's Haywood County to survey the virgin forests of the Great Smoky Mountains. Champion's eventual decision to build a mill there, near the tiny mountain cove of Pigeon Ford, marked the begin­ning of the forest products industry in western North Carolina, and to some degree, of the New South. This story examines the impact of the company on the region, its economy, its folkways and its peo­ple- people like James A. Trantham, a man in comfortable equilibrium between two seem­ingly contradictory worlds. Trantham is a supervisor of ship­ment control at Champion's pulp and paper mill at Canton, North Carolina, and he lives in a 200-year­old house that served as a patriot's command post in a pivotal battle of the Revolutionary War. When he is not working at the mill, Jim Trantham builds exquisite musical instruments-fiddles, banjos, gui­tars, and dulcimers-from the wal­nut and native red spruce of the surrounding Great Smoky Moun­tains. He is also an introspective man who thinks a great deal about the meaning of his home commu­nity and its place ln modern times. "There are trade-offs in every­thing;' he says. "That is one of the lessons of our world. It was a mixed blessing, the coming of industry to western North Carolina, one of the last strongholds against modernity. If your main interest is nostalgia, you might lament the loss of some of our old ways. "But practically, when Peter G. Thomson of Cincinnati brought his new Champion Fibre Company Canton's No.12 paper madJine in 1932 (facing), the most efficient unit of its lime. to Canton in 1906, it meant that the people of the Pigeon River watershed could, at last, rise above the subsistence level and gain a measure of assurance and self­esteem. The people here had been cut off and ostracized for too long by both the state