“It was Mayberry-ish back then,” Sandie Cannon said, , referring to the small and sleepy mountain town that was the setting for the popular long-running TV series “The Andy Griffith Show,” while talking about what the Caldwell County Courthouse was like when she started working there in 1976.
Alan Huffman’s Antiquities Vending Company is home to the largest collection of antique soda machines in the world. He restores the machines for customers, both individual and commercial. Occasionally he gets calls from the History Channel and Discovery Channel.
Often, the customers are just people who found an old soda machine. Maybe it belonged to their grandparents, no one really took care of it, and it has stopped working.
They call Huffman and ask if he can fix it. He always can.
The planned Laurel Park Medical Pavilion is is planned for the intersection of Harper Avenue and Boundary Street, near the Thomas Sayre art installation. There, it will offer preventive medical services, including a range of health screenings and physical exams for women and children and pediatric care. A groundbreaking ceremony is set for Monday.
At a board meeting Wednesday, trustees voted unanimously to stop processing federal student loans. Students would still be free to take out private loans.
A group of Lenoir residents upset that plans to turn slightly more than six acres in their neighborhood into an apartment complex for senior citizens would create traffic hazards and raise property taxes did not find relief on Tuesday. The City Council unanimously approved the development.
The housing project calls for a three-story building designed for as many as 50 senior citizens at the intersection of Brookdale Place and Abington Road, around which opposition has mounted in recent months among homeowners concerned the building will tarnish the character of the largely residential neighborhood.
Sawmills Town Hall was standing room only Tuesday night.
Nearly 40 citizens filled every chair in the room and every parking space in the lot. Combine that with council members and town staff, and the room almost met its fire marshal’s occupancy limit.
The issue at hand?
Trees.
A $2 million contract has been awarded to Maymead Inc. of Mountain City, Tenn., by the N.C. Department of Transportation to apply asphalt surface treatments to 60.8 miles of secondary roads in Caldwell, Watauga and Avery counties. Work can begin as early as April 29 and be completed by Oct. 1.
Augustus Warren Howell of Lenoir pleaded guilty Monday in Caldwell Superior Court to failing to register as a sex offender and being a habitual felon.
The prospect of turning Lenoir into a regional supplier of renewable energy resources might have seemed farfetched not long ago.
But that very thing may start taking shape in the coming year, when Verdante BioEnergy, the only substantial renewable-energy venture in the county, plans to leverage the same natural resources that once helped sustain the furniture industry, such as wood, for liquid biofuel.
Jurors will be allowed to know what police found at Jeremy Mayfield’s house if his Caldwell County case goes to trial.
The man accused of killing a woman in Lenoir on April 5 doesn't even remember it, the man's father said Monday.
“He didn’t know what happened," Richard Whisnant said of his son, Michael Whisnant. “When you’re on drugs, if you did something, you don’t know about it. I’d be in shock too if I saw a dead woman in the house.”
The Caldwell County commissioners are considering supporting Burke County's plea for the state to abandon plans to close a youth prison employing more than 350 people, including dozens from Caldwell County.
The commissioners decided Monday night to postpone a vote on the issue, saying they need more justification before making a formal commitment.
When you turn from U.S. 321-A onto Elmore Drive in Sawmills, you almost have to stop.
There at the turn, the road is riddled with holes. The pavement is old and full of huge rips that fill with water when it rains.
The road is narrow and hasn’t been paved since the 1980s. Now, the asphalt buckles and folds. Go any faster than 20 on Elmore Drive and the jostling feels as if you soon might knock your head on the roof of your car.
There are seven houses and two businesses on this privately owned road. Everyone who lives and works there would like to hand ownership over to the Town of Sawmills.
But town leaders aren’t sure they have the money to take it, at least not this year.
The road leading to the growth of John Pritchard's trucking company in recent years was not smooth.
Nor were the financial dealings involved in going from a single tractor-trailer and driver about seven years ago to a 20-truck fleet with 26 drivers.
But the mounting financial pressure, perpetuated by interest on loans for tractor-trailers and other shipping equipment, subsided a couple weeks ago. That was when Pritchard received a letter from Raleigh saying his company has secured a $250,000 grant for which he had nearly abandoned hope.
The last three years of Tammy Lynn Benge Cassels' life were a sordid tale of drugs and violence. Her face was surgically repaired after a blow to the head from a claw hammer. She was beaten with a belt and burned with cigarettes. Her body was found by police on the night of April 5 rolled inside a comforter in th back room of a house on Wild Cherry Place.
This is the story of a country girl who spent her youth playing with her Barbie dolls, helping in the garden or skating at the Roller Palace on Abington Road, but whose life veered awry.
A computer programmer, a field systems analyst and an electrical engineer walk into a bar ...
Okay, it isn’t a bar but a “hackerspace,” a community-operated space where people gather who have common interests, often in computers, technology and science. The number of self-professed “nerds” plunking down $35 a month to play at the Foothills Community Workshop is up to 17 now.
The original play contains dense, Shakespearean language in verse and song. Friday's featured couplets such as, “O-M-G / The countess has fallen for me.”
The local economy has seen slow but consistent growth in jobs, retail sales and housing sales the past couple of years, local business officials said Thursday morning as they sounded an optimistic note for the coming year.
All three who addressed the Caldwell Chamber of Commerce’s first “Business 4 Breakfast” meeting referred in various ways to the local economy having turned a corner but said that continuing the progress will take constant attention, and housing is a potential bottleneck.
Colten Greer can tell you anything you want to know about Bangladesh – or its capital, Dhaka, or the Ganges River, which flows through it.
He can also tell you about the Netherlands, or Russia, or Israel, or just about any place you could find on a map.
Greer, a Collettsville School sixth-grader, made his second visit to the state Geographic Bee April 5 – and this time around, he brought finished in ninth place.
Caldwell County's unemployment rate dropped by almost half of a percentage point from January to February, putting it a full percentage point lower than February of last year, according to a state report released Wednesday.
The county’s work force has remained relatively steady, at about 38,000, over the past year, while the number of them employed has increased by about 400. The change in employment from January to February amounted to 17 people.
The town is considering pay increases that are entirely merit-based, a switch from a system that included an automatic cost-of-living adjustment for everyone.
William Calhoun Newland was born in McDowell County in 1857 but lived in Lenoir, except short break for three years at West Point, from 1873 until his death in 1938.
Danny Jaynes has two passions: bees and music. It’s an odd mix, but it all makes sense once you hear his story.
A growing pharmaceutical company in Lenoir is working to close a deal this month to buy what once was the corporate headquarters of the county’s most prominent employer, Broyhill Furniture, the latest symbol of a shift in the local job market.
Exela Pharma Sciences has an “immediate need” for extra warehouse and laboratory space and for offices for its executives and administrators, Phanesh Koneru, the president and CEO of Exela, said in an email.
“This is the right place for us,” he said. The company researches and manufactures a range of pharmaceuticals, including injectable drugs.
The company is expected to sink about $8 million into renovating the building.
Andrew Geiger, former casegoods manufacturing director for Bernhardt Furniture, was sentenced Monday to almost five and a half years in federal prison for an eight-year scheme to defraud Bernhardt of more than $563,000.
