Right now, if you live within earshot of Frog Level Brewing Company and want dinner in Hazelwood, you get in a car. The two business districts sit less than a mile apart along Richland Creek, but no paved path has ever connected them, so residents drive around a gap that everyone in town already knows by feel. That gap is finally closing.
This isn't a rendering on a planning department slide. Waynesville's town council recently approved construction of the missing greenway link, the funding is already partly in hand, and the timeline is tied to something as unglamorous as whether an asphalt plant stays open before winter. It's also landing in the middle of the best stretch either district has had in a while, with new places to eat, a packed August concert calendar, and a national ranking that just put downtown Waynesville on the map in a way it hasn't been before. Here's what's actually happening, and why the two ends of that new path are worth paying attention to now, before the pavement even goes in.
The Half-Mile Nobody Ever Paved
The Richland Creek Greenway already does a lot of work in this town. It threads from the Waynesville Recreation Park down toward Lake Junaluska, and a previous expansion built a few years back connected Hazelwood's Dutch Fisher Park to the area near Waynesville Middle School, according to the Town of Waynesville's greenway page. What it never did was connect Hazelwood to Frog Level directly, the two commercial cores that sit closest to each other on the map but have always required a car to reach.
That's the specific segment the town council just greenlit. Waynesville's land use administrator, Alex Mumby, put the purpose plainly, telling The Mountaineer that the new stretch "provides far safer access for families to walk and go to dinner in Hazelwood and Frog Level." Not a tourism amenity. A dinner route.
Who's Actually Paying For It
The financing is worth a second look, because it says something about how this kind of infrastructure gets built in a small mountain town. The town had already spent $20,000 acquiring the property easements needed for the project, and that spending counts toward the 50 percent match required by the grant covering the work. Haywood Waterways Association kicked in a $35,000 donation on top of that. The remaining roughly $72,000 of the town's share isn't new cash at all. It gets covered through the labor and equipment of town employees already on payroll, what the town is calling in-kind contribution rather than a fresh line item.
Zoom out further and the project is one piece of a much bigger pot. The grant funding it came out of an almost $700,000 round the Haywood County Tourism Development Authority recently allocated across 21 separate tourism-related projects and events countywide. In other words, the sidewalk connecting two neighborhood business districts is being paid for largely with the same lodging tax dollars visitors generate when they book a room at Lake Junaluska or a cabin outside town, not with a property tax increase on the people who'll actually use it to walk to dinner.
When Shovels Actually Move
The build itself is split into two phases. Phase one is site prep, handled by the town's public works crew alongside Haywood Waterways, and includes rough grading plus lowering a couple of manhole covers along the route so they sit flush with the new path. Phase two, the actual paving, goes to a third-party contractor. As of the most recent reporting, the town was aiming to put that second phase out to bid in late July or August, which puts the bidding window right around now.
The honest caveat is the same one any small-town public works project runs into this time of year. Completion depends on whether the contractor can get asphalt poured before the plants that supply it shut down for the season. That's not a knock on the project. It's just the difference between a press release timeline and a paving timeline. A realistic bet is late fall rather than late summer, and anyone budgeting an evening walk to a Frog Level show should plan around that window rather than the ribbon-cutting photo.
Meanwhile, Both Ends Of That Path Got Busier
While the paperwork on the greenway moves through bid season, the two districts it will eventually connect have both had a genuinely active year on their own.
- Main Street Diner opened this summer in a space with real history behind it, the old Ian and Jojo's Pizzeria spot on Main Street, which locals also remember as Whitman's Bakery before it closed in 2011 after more than 60 years of business. It's run by Drake Fultz, who already operates Haywood 209 Café and the Crepe & Custard spot at Lake Junaluska. Fultz told The Mountaineer that "opening a third dining establishment was prompted by the success of and demand for our existing ones."
- The Red Fox, an American-style tavern from the Baker family behind Boojum Brewing, has taken over the old Captain's Bay site on Russ Avenue with a stone hearth, a 32-foot oak bar, and a menu built around local ingredients.
- Frog Level Brewing Company has Simple Folk playing the creekside taproom on August 7, part of the live music lineup that's kept the brewery a fixture since it opened.
- The Summer Mountain Street Dance returns to Main Street in front of the Historic Haywood County Courthouse on August 7, the same free tradition that's brought callers, cloggers, and bluegrass bands to that stretch of pavement for generations.
- Downtown Waynesville was named the #2 Best Main Street in America in the USA Today 10Best Readers' Choice Awards this year, a recognition that puts a number on something residents already suspected about their own block.
None of that is background noise to the greenway story. It's the reason the greenway matters more this year than it would have five years ago. A town with one new diner and one new tavern doesn't need a walking connection between its two commercial cores nearly as badly as a town with a diner, a tavern, a brewery calendar, and a nationally ranked Main Street all filling up on the same August weekends.
One Evening, Not Two Errands
Here's the actual shift worth sitting with. Right now, catching a show at Frog Level Brewing and grabbing dinner somewhere in Hazelwood are two separate car trips, even though the distance between them is short enough to walk in fifteen minutes if there were anywhere to walk. Once this segment is paved, probably by late fall based on the town's own timeline, that stops being true. It becomes one evening on foot, not two errands by car.
That's a small thing to change about a town, and also not a small thing at all if you're the one living a few blocks from either end of it. It's the kind of shift that shows up less in a press release and more in how many nights you actually decide to leave the car in the driveway.
Candy Wood and the team at Great Smoky Mountain Homes keep an eye on these projects because we live here too, not because we're trying to sell you on a neighborhood. But if watching Waynesville's map slowly fill back in has you curious what your own corner of it is worth these days, we're always glad to talk it through. Request Your Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready, no obligation attached.
