In progress for the Baker Center at the University of Tennessee

In 2001, Congress authorized the University of Tennessee to receive a grant creating an endowment to establish the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy.

As a U.S. senator, Reagan chief of staff, ambassador to Japan and one-time presidential contender, Howard H. Baker Jr. is remembered as “the great conciliator,” a politician whose intelligence, ethics and demeanor defied partisan politics and, instead, bridged support from all sides.

This same open-minded perspective continues to shape the Baker Center’s very own and very unique window on the world.

The center provides access to an extensive collection of distinguished political archives (including Senator Baker’s own papers), a 15-room interactive museum, white paper research and publications (engaging the scholarship of university students), a wide variety of inspiring public programs, and an outreach to students of all ages, using podcasts, videos and other web-based avenues of communication.


Year to year, the center gives rise to a sequence of rare experiences for students of government—the chance to participate in running dialogues between those whose policies and opinions currently shape our world and those who represent the next generation of regional and national leadership.

(Thanks to Katherine Key, Dennis McCarthy, and Carl Pierce, all of the university, for the chance to craft this overview piece and get involved with communications strategy for the Baker Center.)

The need for a new magazine

The Toe River Valley, years after the exodus of furniture and textile mills and other lynchpins of an earlier economy, is re-inventing itself. The new face of recovery for the region is more likely reflected in the renaissance of small towns, a revitalized tourism, imaginative entrepreneurial ideas and small businesses, creative developments for first and second homes, unmoored web-based workers finding solutions on backporches, the re-discovery of wild waters and wilderness areas, artists and tradespeople who love the high mountains and bring that energy into their work.

It’s a region that’s shaking off its cove and fence mentality, coming together and deciding how to best merge growth and preservation in one of the most precious geographies in the East. There is simply no town like Bakersville, no mountains like Roan or Mitchell, no craft school like Penland, no community college like Mayland, no small college like Lees McCrae, no high apple meadow like Altapass, no rhododendron festival or Wooly Worm race or Toe River crafts trail or theatre quite like Burnsville’s anywhere else in the world. And in DT’s Restaurant in Spruce Pine, the conversation is about fiber optics, linking libraries and campuses and sharing ideas that will reposition the Valley as a great destination and as a rebounding economy.

There’s work to be done, for sure. Per capita income in the three counties is roughly three-quarters of the North Carolina average. Unemployment exceeds 10 percent. There are less than 1,500 non-farm establishments with paid employees across the region.

But the potential for coming together is real and the cross-fertilization of ideas in hospitality, manufacturing, high craft, agriculture, retail, recreation and healthcare is bringing about a new sense of history, place, and possibility.

For second home buyers, real estate can be stunningly beautiful, relatively affordable and part of a comfortable and safe community—all within an easy drive of metropolitan areas like Charlotte. Building a home in the mountains—and bringing a family home to the mountains—creates jobs in construction, in the building trades, in schools and in service industries. It fuels a new economy.

Taking the wide view, timing is excellent for a deeper interpretation of the region in the form of a magazine edited for those who want to get away, get outside, visit often, live here, write their own story, take part in creating a new landscape of appreciation and change.

No other publication or news source serves the Toe River Valley in that way or has that particular intention. So the need is here. And the best role emerges as one of collaboration, creativity and imagination.