Coming down the mountain.

• Author: Nelson, Luann
• Position: Economic impact of Interstate-26 completion

Some residents have high expectations for the last stretch of I-26. For others it's simply a matter of life and death.

In the year 1919, 17-year-old Bryson H. Tilson took the dirt road to Sams Gap near the Tennessee line and, sitting horseback, heard a stump speech he never forgot. Former state Sen. Thomas J. Murray, like young Tilson a native of Mars Hill, had his eye on the future. Soon, he declared, a wide, smooth road would pave the rugged way between Asheville and Johnson City, Tenn., leading to great opportunities for commerce between the two mountain towns and for the people of the isolated farming communities in between.

Bryson Tilson is 90 now and living in a Winston-Salem nursing home. He retired in 1973 after 45 years at Mars Hill College, first as superintendent of buildings and grounds, then director of campus planning. His son Leonard, a retired landscaping-company owner who also lives in Winston-Salem, recalls his father talking about Murray's speech more than once as he drove the narrow, winding U.S. 23 from Mars Hill to Tennessee. "He related this story, I think, out of some frustration that here we are going into the 21st century and no one's been able to do anything to get this road built."

If any North Carolina road qualifies as a dream long deferred, it's the broad, costly -- and still unbuilt -- thoroughfare Murray imagined. But now it looks as though the $174.7 million, 10-mile road -- delayed for decades by lack of political will, conflicting budget demands and environmental concerns -- could be a reality by the end of the century, largely because Tennessee is widening the road to the state line.

Some are unhappy about the proposed extension of Interstate 26, which begins in Charleston, S.C., and ends in Asheville, where U.S. 23 winds through Madison County to Johnson City, Tenn., to I-81. The project -- eight of its 10 miles on a new route -- most angers the nearly 800 environmentalist members of the Asheville-based Western North Carolina Alliance. But much of the region's business community eagerly anticipates an interstate linking western North Carolina to the Ohio Valley and the industrial Midwest. Many remember a time before I-40 was cut through western North Carolina from 1960 to the mid-'70s, and they are fervent believers that better access is the key to prosperity for the mountains.

"I-26 will really complete the road-transportation network for Buncombe County and western North Carolina, with interstate links to the east and west and now to the north and south," says former Asheville Mayor Louis Bissette, co-chairman of the I-26 Corridor Association, founded in 1987 to lobby for the road.

Sam L. Wiggins, a Haywood County native and retired manufacturing director for rubber-products maker Dayco Products Inc. in Waynesville, says there's "no comparison" between life before and since I-40. "The only way you could get in and out was over a high mountain on a two-lane road that was unsafe," he says. "It wasn't conducive to economic development."

Wiggins, director of the Regional High Technology Center at Haywood Community College in Waynesville, says I-40 opened the mountains to companies looking for something besides natural resources and a willing work force -- such as the abundant timber that attracted Champion...