In Canton, a Small-Town Mayor Faces Big Questions

Employees at the Pactiv Evergreen paper mill kept calling Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers one day in March 2023. A mysterious meeting had been scheduled that afternoon. Did he know why? 

Then, the mill’s security team contacted the Canton Police Department. They may want to station officers around town, security ominously suggested.

“At that point, we knew something was up,” said Smathers, who was then in his second term as mayor.   

Finally, someone in the mill’s administrative offices contacted the mayor with a tip: Pactiv Evergreen was planning to close the 118-year-old facility, which made products like paper cups, in just three months. Later that evening, the mill’s manager called and read the mayor a press release to confirm the news.  

It was like “getting the news that someone has died suddenly,” Smathers told The Assembly. 

It’s been a little over three years since Canton abruptly lost its largest employer, more than 1,000 jobs, and 36% of its tax base. The wound is still fresh for Smathers. He has been navigating its impacts, including the sale of the mill property, the start of demolition, and discussions about redeveloping the space.

Following the mill closure, Smathers recalled, a friend commented that it would be a miracle if Canton, a town of 4,400, existed in two years. That attitude “pissed me off,” he said. Instead, Smathers said, “We have fared exceptionally well, which has not surprised me because I know how tough our town is.” 

Regional government organizations helped laid-off Pactiv employees find new jobs. At the time of the mill closure, Land of Sky Regional Council Mountain Area Workforce Development Board Director Nathan Ramsey told the Asheville Citizen-Times that there were 1,200 available manufacturing jobs available in the region. While Ramsey and Smathers say they are not aware of data showing where mill workers landed, the county’s unemployment rate as of this June was 3.2%—roughly the same as it was in March 2023. 

Anecdotally, both also said they are aware that many of the people Pactiv Evergreen laid off have found other manufacturing work, although some retired or moved away. “I am not hearing an outcry,” Smathers said.

The closure had one positive impact on downtown Canton—it ended the rotten-egg smell that lingered in the air on certain days of the production cycle. Without the sulphuric stench, locals think Canton could become a tourist destination. The town fields requests “every other day” regarding space for incoming businesses, said Town Manager Lisa Stinnett. While some inquiries are about redeveloping the mill site, many are from mom-and-pops looking for a place on its quaint Main Street, which is dotted with gift shops and restaurants.

“I think a lot of people anticipated the town drying up and blowing away,” Stinnett said. “And it has been the opposite.” 

The changes have forced the town and its leaders to think about their future—and Smathers is encouraging them to dream big. At the same time, Canton is clawing its way back from two weather disasters in five years. Both have put Smathers, a rare Democrat in small-town Western North Carolina, in a spotlight that has led to speculation about his potential future as a candidate for higher office. But first he’s got to get the future of his hometown on solid footing.   

The ‘Redneck Roosevelts’  

Smathers, 43, seems lab-grown to succeed in local politics: He’s garrulous, conventionally handsome, and slaps people on the back in greeting. Perhaps more importantly for a small mountain town, the Smathers family goes back eight generations in Canton. His granddad owned a grocery store downtown, and his father, Pat, became mayor while Zeb was in high school and served for 12 years. 

When a New York Times reporter visited Canton last year, she wrote, “If Canton had royals, it would be Mayor Smathers’s family.” (Smathers joked that someone once told him they are the “redneck Roosevelts.”)  

Smathers recalls drawing a picture in third grade of what he wanted to be when he grew up: a lawyer. He attended Duke University, where he was president of the Duke Democrats, and then earned his law degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008 before returning to work at his father’s firm. Together they run Smathers & Smathers, Attorneys at Law. 

In 2013, he ran unopposed for the town’s Board of Aldermen; he filed for office the day after marrying his wife, Ashley Smathers. His message centered on the promise of Canton’s blue-collar roots. 

“We had to build the belief that we did deserve nice things, and we did deserve to have a future,” he said. In 2017, the sitting mayor declined to run again. “I thought it was time to continue the momentum we had,” Smathers explained. He ran unopposed that year, then again in 2021 and last November.  

Smathers gives off the air of a Southern good ol’ boy, describing his happy place as drinking a “yard beer” on his lawnmower. When he offered me moonshine during an interview, it wasn’t clear if he was kidding. 

“He looks like an extra from Top Gun, down to the aviator sunglasses,” Western Carolina University politics professor Chris Cooper said. While picking up a coffee across the street from his law office, Smathers spent five minutes chatting with a man about their mutual love of World Wrestling Entertainment before he finally introduced himself as the mayor.  

But Smathers is also a bonafide politics nerd. His iPhone background is a photo of President John F. Kennedy. He points out the first edition of Edmund Morris’ The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt on his office bookshelf and reminisces about the impact The West Wing had on his political education. “I still believe in ‘Bartlet for America,’” he mused. 

He exudes a kind of Jed Bartlet populist optimism. “I inherently believe in our American system,” Smathers said. “I inherently believe in the power of public education, and protecting us, and the ideals that we set out. … As Yankee Doodle as it sounds, I believe in what this country can be.”

But neither he nor his wife, a local teacher who is now a stay-at-home mom to their 6-year-old son, Stone, loves the title of “politician.” The word has a “negative connotation,” she said, wherein “people think you’re not working hard for the people that you represent.” 

Being Canton’s mayor is “not just a position to him,” Ashley said. “I think he sees this as a true calling.”

Liz Rhine, the owner of Papertown Coffee, which sits across the street from his office, said she believes “he always has the town’s best interest at heart. You know he has Canton’s back.”

She added, “Every time he comes in, he always asks—like, he will say every single time—‘Do you need anything from me?’ He wants to make sure that our business is good, that we’re surviving.”

For the last five years, a big part of making sure the town survives has been what Smathers calls the “exhaustive” work of advocating for state and federal recovery funding. 

In 2021, Tropical Storm Fred struck the mountains, destroying multiple homes in Canton and Pisgah High School’s athletic fields. The town suffered about $11 million in losses, Stinnett said. Three years later, just as FEMA recovery projects for Fred got underway, Hurricane Helene put downtown under 10 feet of water, including Town Hall, the police station, and the fire department. Helene-related losses are estimated at approximately $15 million, Stinnett said.

Pactiv’s shutdown eliminated $1.2 million in tax revenue from Canton’s budget. “For a small town, that is significant,” Stinnett said. “To say it was devastating is probably an understatement.”

Smathers said the town has just “eked by” financially. Altogether, Canton has received approximately $153 million in state and federal funds, much of it in grants, for the mill closure, Fred, and Helene, Stinnett said, to cover costs related to wastewater management and treatment, water and sewer infrastructure, flood mapping, and facility relocation, among other services. (In 2025, Canton and Haywood County also received $5.75 million from a settlement from Pactiv.) 

She attributed the influx to the mayor’s political contacts; he travels to Washington, D.C., four times a year and to Raleigh four to six times a year to advocate to the General Assembly. 

Smathers has maintained relationships “on both sides of the aisle in a pretty remarkable way, and in a way that has benefited his constituents,” Cooper said. In March 2025, he appeared at a press conference with U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards, a Republican from nearby Hendersonville, to announce $41 million for Canton’s water system. He has publicly thanked Republicans in the General Assembly and vowed to work with them. And he’s mentioned to me multiple times that state Rep. Mark Pless, a Republican who represents Haywood County, donned a wetsuit and rescued people from flooding in Canton during Helene.

Mayor is officially a nonpartisan position in Canton, but Smathers “is known as a Democrat who can work with anyone and is willing to work with anyone,” said state Rep. Lindsey Prather, a fellow Democrat who represents Buncombe County. “And that will get you very far, especially in Western North Carolina.” 

Pless concurred: “He’s willing to work with about anybody. That makes it a lot easier because a lot of times the Dems and Republicans, we don’t communicate as people like to think we would.”

Smathers says that bipartisan collaboration is practical. “We are best as a town, state, country when we’re doing the bold things,” he said. “But sadly we have let politics, pettiness, and social media bring us down where it’s difficult to even do the small projects without ripping each other apart. Death by a thousand Facebook comments.” 

Demolishing a Legacy

The biggest question on everyone’s mind in Canton is what will be built in the mill’s place. 

Following Pactiv Evergreen’s announcement of the closure, more than 30 prospective buyers considered the site, a local newspaper The Mountaineer reported. In January 2025, Spirtas Worldwide, an industrial demolition, environmental remediation, and redevelopment firm based in St. Louis, paid $3.36 million for more than 700 acres, including 188 acres of the former mill site, 104 acres of Lake Logan, and 250 acres for a landfill, as well as a wastewater treatment plant, a coalyard, a former schoolyard, and a couple of buildings downtown, company CEO Eric Spirtas told The Assembly.

Demolition of the mill began in March 2025 and is expected to take two years. The former mill site project has been dubbed Two Banks Development LLC, a name Spirtas came up with to reflect the Pigeon River, which runs through it. (Why not name it after the river itself? “A pigeon’s a dirty bird,” the CEO explained.) 

This March, Canton purchased 35 acres from Spirtas that include warehouses, a distribution center, and chipyard for $12.5 million, Blue Ridge Public Radio reported. In May, Gov. Josh Stein announced a $3.5 million grant from the federal government to help Canton build a new wastewater plant on the land. The approximately $75 million project will almost entirely be funded by state and federal grants, Smathers said. 

Spirtas says he doesn’t know what he’s going to do with the rest of the property yet. His first priority is preventing future flooding. Unless they can do that, “no one’s coming to build anything,” he said. 

Park Street, Main Street, and railroad tracks all crisscross the Pigeon River in downtown Canton; Spirtas envisions improving water flow under those crossways. “There will have to be a major resilience effort moving earth, working with the [Army] Corps [of Engineers],” he said.  

The developer envisions multiple different concurrent uses for the mill site, rather than one big occupant. He thinks that could include housing, tourism, “some manufacturing without smoke and ooze,” commerce, and retail. On 40 acres of a northern part of the property, he envisions residential development that could include a hotel, condos, or houses. He’s also considering an amphitheater.

David Francis of the Haywood Chamber of Commerce hopes there’s still a future for light manufacturing, such as ceramics maker East Fork Pottery, so that Canton “doesn’t lose its mill town roots.” He said there is no appetite for industrial manufacturing with smokestacks, like Pactiv, to return. 

Smathers would like to see a higher education facility on the property, citing Western Carolina University, NC State University, and the UNC School of Government as three wish-list institutions. A “health care anchor would be great,” Smathers said, and he’d like to see outdoor recreation opportunities. 

He also wants a museum dedicated to Canton’s history. “I think you need to tell the story,” Smathers said. “We’re always worried about being forgotten.” 

One thing he doesn’t want: a data center. Smathers said he held one meeting about a data center with a group out of Durham in January, which left him underwhelmed. (He declined to name the group but confirmed it wasn’t Meta, Amazon, or Apple.) He has concerns about national security, hacking, and foreign influence. The company “couldn’t answer questions that I had, and they couldn’t point to successes and experience, which really did not make me feel at peace,” Smathers said. 

Smathers says he’s had a lot of conversations about what data centers do to a community, he said, remarking that small towns like Canton are told the facilities will boost their tax base. But he’s not buying it. “It would be nice to go from the situation we’re in budget-wise to having plenty of money,” he said. “But not at the cost of a destructive force.” In February, the town’s aldermen voted for a one-year moratorium on data centers while they establish parameters on local development.

Spirtas, who lives in Missouri but visits Western North Carolina frequently, is more open to a data center as part of the future site. 

“I want for the town the best, and what that means is good jobs, good tax base, high-paying tax base,” Spirtas said. In any case, the developer continued, the size of the mill property would limit what size of data center could go there. “This property is not conducive to a megacenter.”

But it’s not entirely up to him. “I have no idea what the town would want or would allow,” the developer said. “That’s yet to be determined.” 

A Job to Finish

Smathers’ handling of his town’s recurrent difficulties has raised his profile around the state, particularly as his party struggles to win over voters outside urban centers.

“I’ve always thought that Zeb would be a phenomenal public servant at a greater level,” North Carolina Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton told The Assembly. “Right now we’re at a point in time where people are getting into politics because they want to be a shiny object. They want to be on TV, or they want to be somebody important. We need more people that really just want to get shit done and that actually want to do right by people.”

Prather says lawmakers in both parties are aware of him in Raleigh, in part because of his advocacy for disaster relief funding. That extends beyond N.C., Clayton said. “Whenever I go to national conferences, his name always comes up. … Organizations that have been invested in the next generation of politics are looking at him.” 

Some Democrats floated him last year as a possible challenger to Edwards, who was seen as vulnerable well before he ended his re-election bid this month following a House investigation into allegations of harassment.

Smathers said the murmurs are flattering, but it’s not the right time. “I got a few phone calls—nothing serious,” he said. “And I just said, ‘Look, I’ve got a job to finish. We have to rebuild Canton again.’ … My duty is to my hometown.” 

Smathers’ wife is not ruling it out, though. “I want Zeb to take any opportunity that he wants to,” she said. “But also, I think you have to be smart about those things. You have to know when it’s right for you personally [and] when it’s right for your family.” 

There are certainly hints it’s on Smathers’ mind. He speaks in sound bites, frequently  mentioning how bouncing back from the mill closure is Canton’s “mill town moonshot.” And without being asked, he volunteered that he is a gun owner who also supports reproductive rights.

But is a life in politics what he wants?

“You don’t get happiness from politics,” Smathers mused. “It can be a very expensive and stressful hobby, to a degree. But I’ve seen you can really make a difference in people’s lives.”  

“Are there other adventures out there? Maybe,” Smathers continued. “Am I open to those? Yes. But as it stands right now, I’ve got a job to finish.”