“I’m just not sure how I feel about having to share this town with tourists for three months.” Kinder or harsher variations on that thought can be heard all over in my small hometown of Brevard, North Carolina around this time of year. At times, complaining about tourists is a fun local pastime (“it took me twenty minutes to drive through downtown today!”) but more disdainful attitudes show Brevard is a town that must learn to adapt so it can survive.

Albeit a grossly overused cliché, Brevard is “nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.” Brevard is high in natural beauty with two huge forests ─ DuPont State Forest and Pisgah National Forest, within short driving distance. Cost of living, however, is also high: according to areavibes.com, it is 6.3 percent greater than the North Carolina average. Brevard has a large population of retired persons, conservative voters and Southern Baptists.

Despite the fact that Brevard appears to be so traditional and conservative, it has recently begun to attract a large amount of young, active types due to its beauty. Bike Magazine recently featured Brevard as one of America’s hidden gems for bike riding, citing specific trails in DuPont and Pisgah. The Assault On the Carolinas bike race, which starts and ends in downtown Brevard, draws thousands of people every year. Of course, these things only add to the already high number of tourists that frequent Brevard, but this increase is not always met with a positive attitude from locals. Some simply have a selfish desire to keep Brevard’s natural beauty to themselves (I guess I have to admit I fall into that category; I would prefer not to run on crowded trails, for example), but others have a true problem with Brevard becoming a town that increasingly relies on tourism as its main source of revenue.

According to Transylvania Planning and Economic Development, manufacturing jobs in Transylvania County have plummeted from 3,500 jobs in 1990 to less than 500 jobs in 2009. This change is due to the 2002 closing of the Ecusta Paper Mill, which primarily made cigarette papers. Ecusta opened during the final years of the Great Depression and allowed many Transylvania County residents to pull themselves up out of poverty. Although many locals can still remember a time when a comfortable living could be made by working at Ecusta, those days are long gone, both for this county and this country. 2002 marks not only the close of Ecusta, but also the beginning of a sharp decline in factories and manufacturing jobs all across the United States, according to the Wall Street Journal.

As hard as it is, we locals need to find a way to get more comfortable with accepting strangers into our town. We can’t produce manufacturing jobs, so we must find another way to compensate, and that is tourism. Nearly 700 jobs in Transylvania County directly relate to tourism, and the industry brought in $71.75 million in 2010, an increase from previous years. So, my fellow locals, here’s the deal: I’ll do my part by standing aside to let cyclists pass me on the Pisgah Forest trails that I would rather have to myself. But let's see if we can muster up more Southern hospitality this summer and less bumper stickers that read, “If it’s tourist season, can we shoot ‘em?”