Canton is the second largest town in Haywood County, North Carolina, United States. It is located approximately 17 miles (27 km) west of Asheville and is allocation of that city’s metropolitan area. The town is named after the city of Canton, Ohio. The population was 4,227 at the 2010 census.

This area was long settled by succeeding original cultures. What is known as the archeological Garden Creek site, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is located upon the south side of the Pigeon River, approximately seven miles west of Canton. It was inhabited from 8000 BCE by successive cultures of native peoples. Villages were developed in the Middle Woodland (200-600 CE) and The Southeast Appalachian Mississippian culture ((1000 to 1450/1500 CE) periods. The historic Cherokee people were the most recent Native Americans to fill this area, which was portion of their homelands in the western Carolinas, southeastern Tennessee, and northeastern Georgia.

The prehistoric peoples built a sum of four earthwork mounds at the site. Three have been excavated, the last two platform mounds in the 1960s prior to residential development.

European Americans did not begin to concur here until the late 1780s, following the American Revolutionary War, United States independence, and achievement cessions of estate to the US by the Cherokee. By 1790, Jonathan McPeters was crop growing the banks of the Pigeon River at the site where Canton developed. Around 1815 the first church was built in what was to become Canton; it was called the Locust Old Field Baptist Church. “Old Field: is a common term referring to areas cultivated or occupied by the Cherokee people, as this was known to be part of their customary homelands.