Ruralite Cafe: Published 10/17/02

By Lynn Hotaling - Associate Editor

We've lost another link to our town's past

Born in Sylva in 1913, when the town was only two dozen years old, Willa Mae Dills Scroggs would have turned 90 in 2003. She arrived the year her hometown became the county seat, and she witnessed both Jackson County's centennial (1951) and sesquicentennial (2001) celebrations, Sylva's 1989 centennial and 1999's 100th birthday party for the Sylva Fire Department, which recognizes Willa Mae's father as its founding father. She died Oct. 4.

As a child, Willa Mae lived in a house built by E.R. Hampton. Longtime readers will recall that it was Hampton's daughter Mae who christened the new town "Sylva" after a favorite hired hand at her father's sawmill.

Willa Mae was the daughter of Allen Jonah and Cora Henson Dills and the granddaughter of Allen Bartlett and Josephine Brendle Dills. Her dad was the town's first real estate broker, and you can read Willa Mae's family history in the road names in the neighborhood that surrounds St. Mary's Catholic Church where we find Josephine, Bartlett and Brendle streets. And Storybook Lane was called Dills Street until 911 road-naming guidelines ruled it too similar to nearby Dills Cove and mandated the name change.

Willa Mae's contributions to The Sylva Herald's 1989 special section that commemorated the centennials of Sylva, Dillsboro and Western Carolina University were considerable. She told me stories, loaned me pictures and pointed me in the right direction to find those elusive tidbits she didn't happen to know. She even supplied the photograph that graced the section's cover - an 1895 shot of Main Street that looks like a page from a wild west story book.

She even had a picture, circa 1900, of a group of young people (including her parents before they married) standing on a frozen Scotts Creek in the vicinity of what is now Western Carolina Chrysler Plymouth Dodge. Temperatures were so cold that year, her parents had told her, that the ice was 18 inches thick and town folks skated on the frozen creek for 11 weeks.

Willa Mae could recreate the Main Street of her childhood. She remembered that M. Buchanan, father of legendary Solicitor Marcellus Buchanan, lived on the site where the Ritz Theater stood for 50-odd years and when the post office was located where Central Carolina Bank is now. When she told me in 1989 about that long ago Main Street, Sylva Supply was the only store that remained from her childhood days. Now it, too, is a part of Sylva's past, and Jackson's General Store occupies the old C.J. Harris building at the corner of Main and Spring streets.

When World War I ended, the tannery whistle blew and the church bells rang, Willa Mae once told me. She also remembered the influenza epidemic that raged during the first world war.

"It was a terrible time," she said. "The well people went from house to house and cut wood and waited on the sick ones."

Public schools were closed due to the widespread sickness, she told me, and that was why Willa Mae attended Sylva Collegiate Institute, a Baptist boarding school in Sylva.

Willa Mae could make the old days come alive when she recounted the tales she'd heard growing up.

Her father, who was always called "Jonah," was christened Allen Elias Dills after his father and grandfather. But young Allen had five older sisters who teased him about being such a big boy.

"They joked that if he had been Jonah he would have swallowed the whale instead of the whale swallowing him and called him 'Jonah,'" Willa Mae said. The nickname stuck and when he was older, he legally changed his name to Allen Jonah Dills.

Another funny story she told was about her grandparents' wedding.

"My great-grandfather was a preacher, and he used to lead the longest prayers," she told me. "He didn't like the idea of his daughter Josephine marrying my grandfather, Allen Dills. So one night during a prayer, Allen and Josephine eloped. The family always joked that they probably got back before he finished the prayer!"

Her father always said that must have been a true story because he'd heard his grandfather pray.

Willa Mae was generous with her time and her memories. Three summers ago, at age 86, she climbed into "Old Red" and served as grand marshal of the fire truck parade that was the culminating event of the Sylva Fire Department Centennial.

Though she's gone now, Willa Mae and her family won't soon be forgotten. In fact, her father's name came up during a meeting of the Sylva town board that was held the day before Willa Mae died. A request to close a road that was constructed but never built included a reference to the "A.J. Dills subdivision" off Hampton Street.

Thanks to Willa Mae, Sylva's record of its past is more complete. Willa Mae took the time to share her memories and tell her stories, and in doing so, she added a number of squares to the patchwork quilt that is Sylva history.

Back to Archive: 10/17/02.