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McRorie's career at The Sylva Herald spanned five decades, and "Knowing Jackson County" contains columns from each one of them. Divided into three sections, People, Places, and Earlier Days, the new book provides personal accounts of Jackson County's past. National figures ("Visit By Great Inventor," first published in 1970, tells the story of Thomas Alva Edison's 1906 stay in Jackson County) are chronicled as are local dignitaries like Gertrude Dills McKee (1988's "1st Woman State Senator") and longtime Register of Deeds Glenn Hughes (1986's "Mr. Democrat").
The stories of Jackson County's earlier industrial base are included as well. From "Clay Mine at Hog Rock," first published in 1976, which gives Walter Allman's description of working in the mine around 1920, to 1981's "County's Eight Newspapers," which welcomes the newly formed Cashiers Chronicle, McRorie's book provides insight into the kind of jobs area people held.
"Knowing Jackson County" also features columns about the Harris-Reese Tanning Co. (later the C.J. Harris Tannery and finally Armour Leather Co.'s Sylva plant when it closed in 1957), Sylva's first telephones, an old corn mill, the ice plant and cabbage and Christmas tree farming.
McRorie's weekly column, first titled "Knowing Jackson County," and later shortened by printers to "Knowing Jackson," was the brainchild of the late J.A. Gray Sr., Herald publisher in 1956 and father of current Herald Publisher Jim Gray.
"Jim's father, J.A. Gray, wanted me to do a weekly feature," said McRorie. "After a couple of weeks, he suggested I make it a column and thought of the name, 'Knowing Jackson County.'"
His choice of subject matter was wide open, McRorie said, with the only constraint that each column had to be about Jackson County.
"I wrote about people and places, and about things that had happened or things that were going to happen," he said. Mostly, the subjects came to him.
"People would come in and ask me to write about someone they knew, or somebody would tell me something that would ring a bell," McRorie said. "I did a lot of research in old newspapers."
Since he had always liked history, McRorie said he was sort of drawn to writing about the county's past.
"The title sort of pointed me towards history, too," he said.
Getting out of the news room to do columns and features was one of his favorite things, the former editor said.
"I always enjoyed doing a feature, going out to someone's house and getting them warmed up," he said. "I liked getting them to open up to me and then writing the story about it. People were always surprised at how I could make a story out of what they said."
During McRorie's 36-plus-year career, certain columns were more meaningful than others. His favorites, he said, were the ones he wrote that included information that hadn't been published before. For example, he said, he wrote about the original petition to form Jackson County that was discovered in a Raleigh archives by one of Williams' WCU history students. McRorie also wrote about the debate in the state capitol that centered around the creation of Jackson from Haywood and Macon counties.
"(Jackson's formation) almost precipitated a constitutional crisis," McRorie said. "At that time every county had one representative in the Legislature, and the total population of Haywood and Macon counties didn't justify three representatives."
McRorie himself found boxes of original Jackson County documents at the Register of Deeds office in Sylva, and wrote a number of columns from the old county government records.
"I discovered them just through luck," he said. "I had to have a pole to get the boxes down off a shelf." The records were stored there because the register of deeds once served as clerk to the county board of commissioners.
When asked if there was anything he wished he'd written about but didn't, McRorie couldn't think of one but said there were some people he wished he could talk to again.
"As I went through time I got educated on things, but when I did the interviews I didn't know enough to ask the right questions," he said. Two people that came to mind were T.C. Bryson Sr., who was the first to advocate moving the county seat from Webster to Sylva, and one of William Sylva's daughters who happened by the newspaper office just a few weeks after McRorie came to The Herald. Because he was still new to the area, McRorie didn't know that little was known about the later years of Sylva, the man for whom the town of Sylva is named. Likewise, when he interviewed Bryson, McRorie didn't know of the heated controversy that surrounded the 1913 relocation of the county seat.
McRorie's job at The Herald was his first and only writing job, he said. He came to Sylva for an interview a few weeks before he received his UNC degree and started work that same June.
"Sylva was a different town back then," McRorie said. "Main Street was two-way, and everybody came downtown on Saturday. Winn-Dixie was on one side of the street and the A&P was on the other."
It was on a Saturday that McRorie came for his job interview. He hitched a ride as far as Asheville with a fellow student, and took the bus on into Sylva. He got off the bus at the station, located on Mill Street near where Ward's Plumbing is now.
"When I got off the bus there was a pile of people around. I asked one of them if he could tell me where to find The Sylva Herald," McRorie said.
"I doubt if you can find one on Saturday. They're generally sold out by now," the fellow responded.
During his years of column-writing McRorie was often surprised by which stories people liked. One week, when stuck for a topic, McRorie did a chronological list of events from each decade since the county's formation in 1851.
"People really liked it," he said.
McRorie and Frizzell chose the columns to be included in the book, and Williams did the final editing. It was decided to publish a series of paperbacks, Williams said, in order to keep printing costs down and make the books more affordable to area residents.
McRorie's book is the only one known that consists of writings first published in The Sylva Herald.
"I appreciate the number of years J.D. devoted to the research involved in those columns," said newspaper publisher Jim Gray. "What a chore to write one every week. At the same time, it was one of the best-read columns in the paper. People looked forward to seeing it every week."
Since his retirement, McRorie spends his time building model ships. He uses a method called "plank on bulkhead," and can spend nearly a year on each one. If he ever writes another book, he said, it will be fiction - if he can make himself do the research.
"I've gotten lazy since I retired," McRorie said.
McRorie, a contributing writer to "The History of Jackson County," lives in Sylva with his wife, Loqueta, to whom "Knowing Jackson County" is dedicated. The McRories have a son, John, of Sparta, N.J., a daughter, Sara Burgin of Waynesville, and four grandchildren, Tyler and Zachary McRorie, and Stacey and Will Burgin.
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