Story and photos by Ethan Horton
CANTON, North Carolina – Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers got a call on the afternoon of March 6 — the town’s paper mill security needed extra police presence for an emergency meeting.
Something was wrong.
Call after call and text after text — and eventually, Facebook post after Facebook post — from people in the meeting confirmed what he didn’t want to think about.
He sprinted down the hallway to his dad’s office at their downtown law practice, Smathers and Smathers, and told his father to close the door.
“The mill is closing.”
“You serious?” Pat, his dad, asked. “Part of it?”
“No, all of it.”
Pat, who was the mayor of Canton for more than two decades, decided that maybe Pactiv Evergreen, the corporation that owns the mill and employs its 1,100 workers, was trying to bust its union.
Zeb was numb.
On the walk to the emergency meeting site, he passed Papertown Coffee. He passed the union hall. He passed a middle-aged worker with tears in his eyes.
Canton was about to become a mill town without a mill.
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Mural after mural and storefront after storefront have mill-centered decorations and branding.
The plant opened in 1908 and the corporation that originally operated it, Champion, built about 60 houses just to the west of the plant for its workers. Fibreville, as the neighborhood was dubbed, still exists today. The Champion name is still etched into buildings and painted on road signs.
Champion was family-run for much of the 20th century, first by the founder, Peter Thomson and his son, Logan, and then by Reuben Robertson Sr. and his son, Reuben Jr. The Robertsons even had a now-demolished YMCA building named after them.
After several acquisitions and even Warren Buffet purchasing shares in Champion, the employees of the Canton mill — led by its strong union, whose building sits in the middle of town looking out at the mill campus — bought the plant. Seven years later, Evergreen took over.
Even the air in the small mountain town is dominated by the paper mill. The only escapes from the smell — which is like sitting in a room full of rotting eggs — are the coffee shops or the burger places the mill workers frequent during their lunch hour.
Pat doesn’t think the air is harmful, given that he’s a seventh-generation Canton resident, and he’s still upright.
Half of the vehicles driving down the maze of narrow, brick building-lined streets downtown are pickup trucks, most of which have modified mufflers that cover up the constant low, metallic rumbling of the mill.
The mill’s whistle — which sounds more like a siren and can be heard several miles away — blows at the start of the workday, at lunchtime, and in the middle of the afternoon. Oh, and at the beginning of every Pisgah High School home football game.
Zeb has made a deal with Pactiv Evergreen to keep the whistle in the town’s possession. But, when June 9, 2023, comes and goes, Canton will lose its only major employer.
It will smell like any other Smoky Mountain town. The constant low, metallic rumbling will stop. The murals will picture a 185-acre industrial relic.
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Just before 5:30, Cory Vaillancourt, a journalist with The Smoky Mountain News, arrived at the emergency meeting spot. It was a small auditorium near the mill, and he’d never seen it open.
He’d heard rumblings, but nothing specific. Just 90 minutes earlier, Vaillancourt was about to crack open a beer at home in Maggie Valley, N.C., but he got an inkling that he should head out.
“It’s probably nothing,” he texted his editor.
A few workers were outside the auditorium when he got to Canton, but another lap around the mill and dozens were gathered outside. And, the doors were propped open.
He parked and got out. Apparently, there was no security to check identification.
“What time are we supposed to be here?” Vaillancourt asked a mill worker standing by the door, trying to fit in. He even, luckily, looked the part — he hadn’t shaved in a couple days and was wearing Carhartt pants and a t-shirt.
“5:30.”
He wasn’t afraid of the consequences of going in — after all, he’d been shelled by Russian artillery in Ukraine just three months prior on another reporting trip. He just didn’t want to miss the story.
The last one in, Vaillancourt stood at the back of the room and hoped nobody would clock him. Almost immediately, a giant, bald, flannel-clad man tapped him on the shoulder.
It’s over, he thought.
The man just wanted Vaillancourt to take a seat, but there were none available, so he sat down along the wall.
Then, the executives marched out from a back room.
“We have some bad news, we’re going to get right to it. The mill is closing sometime during the second quarter of 2023.”
The announcement in Pactiv Evergreen’s 40-person, never-used auditorium in Canton was met by only one gasp. Otherwise, the workers were silent.
Vaillancourt started recording. If he let himself speak, it would’ve been “Holy shit!”
“It is not at all a reflection of the people in this room,” Byron Racki, a Pactiv Evergreen eexecutive, told the group. “It is largely — almost exclusively — a reflection of the market conditions.”
Workers slumped in their chairs and rubbed their foreheads in disbelief. Some texted their loved ones. One woman wiped away tears.
Mill workers had gathered at 5:30 p.m. on March 6, not knowing what the meeting was about, and left about 15 minutes later, knowing they’d be out of a job within just a few months.
As the workers filed out, reality started to set in.
The giant, bald, flannel-clad man, Vaillancourt realized, was an undercover security guard. He stood in the back of the room, making sure nobody attacked the executives handing down the news.
The workers didn’t know, though, that some of those executives had sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of Pactiv Evergreen stock.
Just four days before the announcement, CEO Michael King made more than half a million dollars, and Byron Racki — the executive who stood in the auditorium full of employees and told them their lives would change — sold off nearly $50,000. Two others sold off more than $100,000 between them.
By 5:50 p.m., Vaillancourt had posted the news to Facebook.
He had told more people they were losing their jobs than Pactiv Evergreen did via its 40-person never-used auditorium announcements.
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Tommy Long had to sit down on pallets near his workstation at the Canton paper mill. He couldn’t quite believe what he’d just heard. He thought — hoped, maybe — that it might have been a cruel joke.
Workers nearby were panicking. Some were angry.
The air was sucked out of the room.
After 25 years working in the mill, Long got the news that it would be shutting down from a fellow employee — who had been at one of the auditorium meetings.
“The floor just evaporated beneath you,” he said.
His co-worker, Jimmy Riddle, found out while eating a meatloaf supper on his couch. His wife, Rebecca, got a call from her best friend, who had seen the Facebook post from Vaillancourt.
“What’s Jimmy going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“The mill is closing!”
Riddle, like Pat Smathers and Zeb Smathers and Tommy Long, didn’t believe what he was hearing.
His father and his grandfather and four of his uncles and two of his cousins had all worked at the mill. Riddle himself had been working there for 18 years, most of those as an electrician. He’d even recently been taking bids on a contract for the mill.
One of the mill’s leaders was at the gate handing out papers explaining the situation as workers drove in the next morning.
When Riddle got to his small break room and sat down, paper in mill-worn hand, the weight of it all finally hit him. It was over.
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Vaillancourt would’ve put a 10% chance on the mill closing before the announcement.
There were whispers about a sale or maybe a scale-back. Few were expecting a full shut down.
Pactiv Evergreen boasted $6 billion in net revenue during 2022 in an investor meeting the day after it announced the mill was closing, but decided restructuring was its best option moving forward.
“We assess all changes to the business with considerable thought for our employees, customers, shareholders and communities, and do not take these decisions lightly,” King, the CEO, said in a March 6 press release. “We remain committed to doing what’s right, treating everyone with respect, and delivering on all of our commitments to our people, customers, shareholders and the communities where we operate.”
Just one month prior, Pactiv Evergreen had shut down one of its four machines, a PM20 built in 1960, according to Vaillancourt’s reporting.
All the employees that worked on that machine were reassigned. None were laid off.
Paper demand was declining, but only slightly. The domestic demand was still expected to be nearly 8 million metric tons in 2026.
Rising costs in production, according to a 2022 market report, along with lower demand because of digitalization, brought with it an environment difficult for growth — the “market conditions” the executives told the employees about.
“I’m not frustrated about business decisions being made,” Zeb said. “I’m frustrated that there’s people that are suffering because of it. It’s just heartbreaking to see your community go through this on a personal level.”
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In 2021, some of the worst flooding the town had ever seen hit Canton during Tropical Storm Fred. The mill, the municipal building, the police station— everything was flooded.
The football stadium — the center of pre-flood Friday nights — still hasn’t fully reopened because of damage.
People on both sides of the political aisle came to Canton’s aid then, Zeb said. Now, he feels like the mill closure is “flood déjà vu.”
Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, has visited Canton — a town of about 4,400 — and offered his administration’s support.
Attorney General Josh Stein, another Democrat and a candidate for governor in 2024, has vowed to fight Pactiv Evergreen for everything it owes the town — and the state, from a $12 million grant the company received from 2015 to 2021.
Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.), Canton’s congressman, has pushed for the SEC to investigate the mill closure after the stock sell-off was revealed.
Zeb wants part of Canton’s legacy — beyond the hardships and the loss — to be this rare cross-canyon bipartisanship.
Anger, he said, isn’t going to get Canton anywhere.
“You tell the story, you value the history,” he said.
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Long, who is also a Haywood County commissioner, is staying at the mill until it officially closes to gain his full severance package, which gives him 26 weeks of pay.
Riddle is staying even longer to do some post-closure maintenance.
But, Long said many of his younger colleagues — whose severance packages wouldn’t be as large as his — have already left and found other jobs. With the current labor shortage, this might have been the best time for the mill to close, he said.
Even Riddle, who is 58, started looking for jobs on Indeed the day after the news broke.
While he had two jobs lined up before he found out he’d be staying past the closing date, Riddle knows his age could impede his ability to find another place to work.
“That’s the only downfall about being 58 years old,” he said. “They can’t discriminate against age, but whenever you’re sitting there — I’ve got a gray beard — and there’s a guy that’s obviously in his late 20s or early 30s, they’re thinking, ‘I can get more time out of him.’”
Riddle had worked alongside James Schrader, an instrument man, every day for 15 years, and Schrader turned down the severance package for a new full-time job, just like another half-dozen electricians Riddle worked with.
Job fairs and hiring events are commonplace, and hiring signs are dotted along the road to Asheville. Many employees have already found where they’ll be working next — many of them 20-25 minutes down the road in Asheville.
Production at the mill has already slowed from the lack of labor.
Pratt & Whitney, an aviation propulsion company, recently opened a new 1 million square foot factory in Asheville that is expected to add a total of 800 jobs to the area by 2027 — and Long said the new facility provides a great opportunity and an opportune time.
The town is sponsoring a website, Mill Town Strong, to help workers losing their jobs find resources and other work opportunities. Many of the mill’s workers are specialized, and would need training to move fields, which Mill Town Strong provides resources for.
“It’s trying times and it’s not going to get any better until they totally shut down,” Long said. “People are going to have to get out of comfort zones and work jobs they haven’t worked in years.”
The mill’s average salary is $85,000 — compared to the town’s median income of just under $30,000 — and Pat Smathers said he thinks of the loss of so many high-wage jobs as a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, he said, high wages pump money into the local economy and provide more high-paying jobs. On the other, the high wages have kept some larger industries from moving into Canton.
The closure could eventually open up the campus for redevelopment if Pactiv Evergreen decides to sell the property, which is valued at about $19 million. Zeb said he hopes that process begins as soon as possible, maybe even within the next year.
“I think a year from now, we are still hurting, but we’ve come to terms,” he said. “We’re learning how to walk again, maybe even taking larger steps.”
Zeb is working to open the mill up to the public for tours in its final months to show people inside the place that has kept lights on around Haywood County.
He thinks of the shutdown as a death in the family, and he said there needs to be a funeral and visitation.
“And much like funerals, there’s times to cry, there’s times to laugh, but it allows you to come to terms and then take the next steps,” he said.
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Driving down what the locals call Radio Hill on March 7 after dropping his 3-year-old son Stone off at preschool, Zeb saw in front of him the entire mill campus — mill smoke and workers and all.
Nothing had visibly changed, even though everything had.
Stone represents the ninth generation of Smathers who have lived in Canton. He loves seeing the “choo-choos” roll through town and into the mill grounds. He loves moving his fist up and down to get mill trucks to honk.
He doesn’t understand that 1,100 people are losing their jobs.
He doesn’t understand that many of them found out through a Facebook post from someone who sneaked into a meeting.
He doesn’t understand why the trains and trucks aren’t going to be rolling through Canton as often.
Stone won’t remember the trains or the trucks. He won’t remember the rumbling. The smell. The mill workers.
