Ruralite Cafe: Published 12/28/00

By Lynn Hotaling - Associate Editor

Remembering Sylva's 'Christmas miracle'

I remember it because it was just a couple of months after the birth of one of my three personal miracles, my daughter Elizabeth.

In a story headlined "A Christmas Miracle," The Dec. 24, 1981, Sylva Herald reported: "Sylva's 1981 Christmas miracle occurred Friday."

According to my calculations, which are based neither on "new" or "fuzzy" math but on plain old arithmetic, that means the "miracle" happened Dec. 18, 1981, since this paper always bears a Thursday date.

"A runaway tanker truck loaded with 8,400 gallons of gasoline got through Sylva's busiest intersection without anyone being injured. But the tanker crashed into a car lot. And police estimated damages totaling over $100,000," The Herald reported.

The accident happened just before 2 p.m. The tanker's brakes failed, and the driver, Allen Bryan Vaughn of Inman, S.C., went through the intersection of Business 23 and N.C. 107 and crashed into the Cagle and Son Ford car lot, Sylva Police Chief Harold McMahan said.

Ten vehicles in the car lot were damaged and nine were described as total losses by Chig Cagle of Cagle and Son.

In addition, a 1971 Ford pickup owned by Clyde Setzer of Waynesville was totaled. Setzer and his wife had walked away from their parked truck, which was directly in the path of the tanker, just moments before the accident.

Traffic was extremely busy when the accident occurred, according to Chief McMahan. Christmas shoppers, Western Carolina University students going home for the holidays, Jackson County Schools recessing early for the holidays and some plant employees going home from work were all converging on the intersection, he said.

"It's Sylva's Christmas miracle," said Sgt. Lindon Allen of the Sylva Police Department, who reported that when he arrived on the scene, just minutes after the accident, he could see five school buses.

Entering the intersection at between 50 and 60 miles per hour, the tanker travelled 150 to 200 feet from the junction and cleared a 30-foot-wide path through the lot. The Setzer vehicle was pushed the length of the car lot, according to the newspaper report.

We were first reminded of the 1981 "Christmas Miracle" last February when another tractor-trailer lost its brakes at that same intersection and overturned on top of two other cars. Though three were injured, there were no fatalities, a fact that seemed miraculous to those of us who saw the damage to the two small cars that were crushed by the truck.

I remembered the Christmas miracle again this week while casting about for a story from years past that had a holiday connection.

History is on our minds here at the Cafe right now. It's partly because the last issue of the year is always a time for reflection and recapping the year's top stories and pictures. But we have a special reason for looking to the past this year. We are about to embark on Jackson County's sesquicentennial year. It was 150 years ago, in 1851, that Jackson was formed from Macon and Haywood counties. And for half of those years, since 1926, The Sylva Herald or its forerunner, The Ruralite, has been reporting local news.

Even though the story I recounted here is only 19 years old, several things have changed. Cagle and Son Ford dealership has been closed for a while now, and both McMahan and Allen have been retired from the Police Department for several years. One thing that hasn't changed is the traffic at the N.C. 107/Business 23 intersection, which remains Sylva's busiest.

We're pretty excited about the county's century-and-a-half birthday, and we're gearing up for our own three-quarters-of-a-century celebration as well.

So, starting next week, we plan to include something from our early files in each edition of The Sylva Herald. It may be a story that we retell, as I did here, or we might quote an article in its entirety. We may reproduce an early photograph that we have published before, or we may include a picture we know little about, hoping some of our readers can help us with its origins.

At some point during the year, we intend to publish a special section to commemorate the county sesquicentennial. We hope to time our keepsake edition to coincide with a countywide celebration of Jackson County's proud past.

We are looking forward to exploring the past, and we hope this year's historical features will shed some light on the Jackson County of bygone days.

Back to Archive: 12/28/00.