ASHEVILLE, N.C. — When the waters of the Swannanoa River receded after Helene's devastating floods, a quiet mission of recovery began in Asheville. For many in western North Carolina, rebuilding wasn't just about homes and businesses - it was about salvaging memories that the floodwaters threatened to erase.
When Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26, nearly a foot of rainfall had already drenched parts of western North Carolina, including Asheville. What would happen next would ultimately go down as the new flood of record with some parts of the state recording over two feet of rainfall at the end of the event.
That rainfall created landslides and flash floods, which devastated the mountain communities of western North Carolina.
Homes and businesses were destroyed, especially along many area river basins, including the Swannanoa River. For Asheville, the Swannanoa River collects runoff rainfall 43 miles upstream of downtown.
Many days after Helene hit, belongings from those homes and businesses are still being found.
That's where we meet Taylor Schenker.
Her story begins with her and one of her friends who unfortunately lost her entire home in the flood. Though she was able to save her neighbors, she lost her belongings.
After the storm, Schenker and her friend went walking along the riverbank looking for some of those items, and Schenker happened to find photographs in remarkably good condition. She says she knew she had to do something.
"I knew that they would need a little bit more effort to help them find their way home, so I went back the next day and scooped them up, started the Instagram and the rest is history," Schenker said.
Schenker started an Instagram account called "Photos From Helene" where she posted images of the photos, inviting followers to recognize her findings. She knew that for people who had lost so much, that having these items back would mean something special.
"These are baby photos and wedding photos and such intimate moments in people's lives that it's really a privilege to be able to hold these photographs and these important memories and give them back to people," she said.
She remembers a couple of different times when she was especially moved by being able to return something to its original owner. Someone was able to find Photos From Helene on Instagram and connected Schenker with a family whose son passed away a few years ago.
"When they lost their home, they lost virtually all proof that their son existed and so for me to find [their] photos and be able to return them has been really meaningful because those memories cannot be recreated," Schenker said.
Another story involved the only time when Schenker has used her Instagram account to reconnect a family with something other than a photograph.
One family who lost their belongings lost an urn with remains of a loved one who passed away. Schenker was contacted by a search and rescue team that located the urn, delivered it to Schenker who then posted it on her account, "and within two hours I was handing it back to the family that it belonged to and that was really special because they were dealing with some difficult circumstances," she said.
Schenker has posted over 600 photos online, has reunited several dozen with their owners and still has hundreds that need to be posted to her account. I even found a wedding photo myself while I was along the Swannanoa River for this story and will be sending that to Schenker, who will hopefully get it in the right hands.
"When I do get to reunite photos in person, or even when I send them in the mail, I always make time to write a note or tell them, 'I'm so glad that you made it through this. I'm so sorry that your home did not, but I'm so glad that you're still here with us and that we're able to reunite you with these photo memories,'" she said.
Six and a half miles down the river, the Antique Tobacco Barn, a beloved Asheville institution, faced its own battle with the Swannanoa River.
General Manager Brittany Cort remembers the day vividly. "We hiked down maybe the morning after the storm," Court said. "We got here just in time to watch the doors buckle and so much of this flow out of the building," she said.
Knowing the storm was coming, Brittany and her husband, David, tried their best to salvage the antiques being sold by some of their vendors, storing them in trailers near the building.
Not all of their vendors had a chance to remove or protect their items before the flood. David took time to protect some valuable jugs for one vendor who wasn't able to make it to the barn in time.
"Most of those jugs got swept away, but some got filled with mud," he said. "Brittany called a vendor meeting a month or so later and one of them was looking so dejected and just sitting in his truck smoking cigarettes and I was like, 'Jim! I got your jugs!'"
Brittany tells me that the barn will be coming back more resilient with an expectation that the river will flood again. "When it does inevitably flood again we have a way to mitigate without having the environmental impact of all our stuff going down the river," she said.
As cleanup continues, the Antique Tobacco Barn is getting ready for their reopening soon, hoping to take even better care of their vendors than they already do.
"We feel pretty committed to coming back with our locals a little bit more in mind. We're going to have a bunch of events out back and we're going to bring back line dancing." Brittany Cort said. "This barn was the biggest dance hall in the southeast in the 1920s, and I think the building wants to have some fun again."
Part of moving forward after Helene wreaked havoc on Asheville has meant becoming an even tighter community and as businesses like the Antique Tobacco Barn get ready to open again, to Brittany, that means focusing on what makes the city so great.
"We're all really passionate about the items themselves and the history and where they come from, but ultimately it's about the people behind each one of those little sections of our store," she said. "That's the community behind the people who sell the items - it's almost as eclectic as the variety you actually find in the store."
Through lost photographs and antique treasures, Asheville residents are finding ways to heal - not by forgetting the past, but by preserving it.
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