Railroad or Native Americans?

Can't you see this design charrette is tearing us all apart?

Or perhaps a little more trouble than it was worth. The Enquirer-Journal has the story (also featured earlier in last week's Waxhaw Exchange). From the article:

The two most popular images were a profile of a Waxhaw Native American, and the other was of the railroad tracks with a train, each with “Waxhaw” in a railroad track inspired font.

Lew Holloway, Waxhaw Small Town Main Street designer, who led the charrette, summarized the event’s results. Then he invited residents to the front of the room to look at the posted design variations, and to write their comments.

Apparently sides began forming shortly afterward. Read the entire article to see the differing opinions from various sides that essentially can be summed up as pro-railroad, anti-railroad, pro-Native American, and anti-Native American. The mysterious Sherri Phengchard did a good job on this article in my opinion.

To download the nearly 50-page design charrette follow-up, visit the town's page to get the PDF file. (If I had to guess, the images being referred to in the article are those on pages 34-36 of this document.) Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

As for my opinion, of the two generic ideas (railroad or Native Americans) and not based on any designs, I would choose the former over the latter. Railroads (see this year's derailment) are much more a part of current Waxhaw than Native Americans for better or worse. Besides what the museum is doing, off the top of my head I cannot think of any other significant aspect of modern day Waxhaw that has embraced the town's Native American heritage, so it would be an unlikely top selling point if I were running things. But I'm just a simple blogger.