From Staff Reports 

CANTON — All activities  at the 114th Canton Labor Day Festival — except for the Labor Day parade downtown at 10 a.m. Sept. 6 — have been canceled due to the recent deadly flooding suffered by the town and surrounding Haywood County from Tropical Depression Fred.

A news story on the damage to Canton and Haywood County appears on Page A9. 

This festival was to have featured the country group Diamond Rio, a CMA, Grammy-winning and six-time Vocal Group of the Year, as the headliner.

“As the oldest festival of its kind in the South, Canton Labor Day honors the blue-collar workers who power our economy with their bare hands and deliver the products and services upon which we all depend,” a press release noted.

What’s more, insofar as the history of the parade, the town’s website states: 

“Canton’s Labor Day festival began in 1906 as a celebration of the Western North Carolina worker whose grit and fierce determination led to the construction of the Champion Fibre Company paper mill that would persevere through a great depression, two world wars and two buy outs.”

“