A brown fog of dust and dirt billowed through Old Fort, N.C., as Amy Davis served chicken and dumplings to every person who wearily climbed the steps of her country store.聽
By her rough estimation, it seemed as if half the town of about 820 had become homeless by the end of Hurricane Helene's devastation. The wind and water had tossed mobile homes hundreds of yards and washed away cars into the Catawba River, leaving the town's residents to wait for the restoration of cell service and the arrival of help from across North Carolina.
In the days after the flooding, the sun beat down on Old Fort and froze a thick layer of mud and muck around the houses, stores and churches that residents and visitors from surrounding counties now worked to break up and clear.
Power and running water had become an afterthought. Everyone who remained either walked the streets of the town in a daze, worked feverishly to clear debris, or a bit of both.
Davis positioned a "check-in" list on a poster board near the stairs of her store, which collected names of individuals and families from the edges of the town to then post on the Old Fort Facebook page as "safe."
There were still many families and elderly couples unaccounted for in the outer edges of the town. Feeding the rescue workers and wandering Old Fort residents was how Davis figured she could make the biggest difference.
With her family and fellow neighbors, Davis spent the weekend following the storm clearing the streets and cutting down trees until they reached the country store. When they realized the building was still intact, Davis and her family started putting together plans for free meals.
"It's not just that they're getting hot food and a hot meal, but that they know the family that's making it, and they know that we're from here," Davis said. Her husband's family traced their lineage to the mid-1700s, when English and Scottish settlers had arrived in the area, before it became a fort in the Revolutionary War.聽
As the lunch hour arrived Wednesday morning, construction workers climbed the stairs in grime-soaked T-shirts and pants. With about a dozen others, they cleaned a number of properties that lined the town's main street, Catawba Avenue, including the Hillman Beer brewery, which opened in 2020.
The brewpub is one of two breweries in Old Fort, which is a dry town situated in the dry McDowell County. It was only relatively recent state laws that allowed breweries across North Carolina to serve beer, wine and cider in dry counties, but only what they made themselves.
Residents felt a deep sense of connection to the brewery as a new kind of meeting place that attracted tourists traveling from Charlotte to Asheville.
Jeff Parker, the landlord that owned the property in addition to many others in the downtown area, said the brewery had become the social hub of the Old Fort community.
But now the building's upcoming Oktoberfest decorations were caked in mud. A twisted smell of yeast rose from sludge of the taproom, where dozens of kegs were stacked on top of one another.
"It's all concrete masonry and stainless steel," Parker said of the building. "It's going to be a lot of work, but we're not giving up."
In the streets of the town, employees from the N.C. Department of Transportation, Old Fort residents, members of the Coast Guard and others cleared away trees and debris. Caravans of military jeeps, semi-trucks, and police vehicles filled the faded parking lots. Helicopters thundered overhead about every hour, a strange sight for Old Fort.
Chuck Aldridge, a local bed and breakfast owner, pointed to the surrounding buildings with a warning: the sewer system needed to be replaced, and it wasn't something the town could do without help from the state.
What they could do was take care of their own. On Monday, days after the storm had passed, Old Fort's police chief called Bo Cooper, who managed a Columbia Forest Products warehouse, and asked if the town could use it as a distribution center for supplies.
By the next day, Cooper was driving a forklift in the warehouse, surrounded by dozens of others who carried food and supplies to trucks and waiting families.
Residents drove pickup trucks with stacks of water bottles and toilet paper loaded into their beds and drove them down the streets and avenues of Old Fort.
At the edge of the mud-covered parking lot of the Old Fort Elementary School, which is a mere 3 years old, two sister teachers reunited with three students who brought flowers and cards with well wishes.
"We love you, we'll be praying for you," one of the cards read. "We have Old Fort pride deep inside."
"That's the truth! We'll come back," Lindsay Rowland Latham said. "That hurricane will spit out the Rowland girls."
Her sister, Anna Rowland, stared ahead at the old white house she had grown up in. She had been staying in the house with their mother, Emily, and her sister Lindsay, as the floodwaters rose around it.
When they left the house and reached higher ground near the school, their family watched a couple with a 10-month-baby clinging to its mother's chest wade in knee-deep water to break into the school windows. The man had grabbed a tree-limb and broke the glass to get his family in after the waters swept away their car, Rowland said.
Rumors abounded about what would happen to their classes. Both Rowland and Latham worried about many of their students who lived further out from town and mulled over potential meeting places at nearby churches.
"They don't want to split the kids up but what are you going to do?" Latham said.
Inside the elementary school, there was already a strong stench of sewage that choked the hallways. Filth streaked across the terrazzo floors and masked construction crews sawed open the floor of the basketball gym, where the water had buckled and ruined the seams of the hardwood. Outside, the recess yard was an endless field of dried mud.
The surrounding rows of houses and mobile homes was worse. The structures stood on low-lying land now filled with mounds of silt and packed dirt that cracked and sunk around feet, exposing tree roots, fractured fences, tarps and plastic bottles.
Glass scattered across the rooftop of a house, where its owner had punched out a window to escape the rising flood. Back in front of the elementary school, Emily Rowland stood with Belinda Wright, a neighbor from down the street.
Wright said she was asleep Friday morning when she heard a knock on the door. She grabbed pictures, the ashes of her mother and granddaughter, and left. The next thing she knew, the floodwaters were slapping up on the porch and her daughter was pushing her out of the house.
"We got out about as far as the Old Fort exit, and we watched our life float away," Wright said. "Every last bit of it."
Rowland turned her gaze over to the house her family had built and lived in for the last 20 years.
"That's all they knew," Rowland said of her daughters. "They walked across the street every day for work, and now it's all gone."
After a pause in conversation, the two glanced at each other with small smiles hinting on their faces.
"I'm just glad you're OK, honey," Rowland said, pulling Wright into an embrace.