The Swannanoa and French Broad rivers flooded a few weeks ago. The flood of 2024 was the largest and worst flood most of us have ever seen. The storm did a large amount of damage and destroyed many homes and businesses. It was not our first flood and will not our last.

In the flood in the early 1940s, the water went over the top of the Swannanoa River bridge as well. The Beacon mill was forced to shut down before the shift was over. My uncle Robert Whitaker was riding to work with a salesman who also lived on Old Fort Road in Fairview. He tried to get Carroll Sales to leave and go home early. Carroll refused. He believed people were just making up how bad the flood was. Beacon later shut down. The flood was by then so bad you could not drive. They were forced to walk over the mountain to Fairview. It was raining so hard that the rain in the gullies on the mountain was waist deep. Uncle Rob was still raising cane about Carroll Sales refusing to leave work early when I was a boy. That storm flooded the lower Beacon village as well.

The recent Swannanoa River flood was made much worse by the changes made since the 1940s. US 70 was then what we call Old 70 and is on the northside of the river. The present highway was not opened until around 1950. New 70 was three lanes wide at first. It was widened to five lanes by the ’80s. Swannanoa businesses began to move to the new highway.

Very few businesses are left downtown. New 70 gets a large amount of traffic. Old 70 had the river on the southern side of the road and a steep bank on the north side of the road. It made it hard to build on that road. It left little room for business. This resulted in people filling in the southern floodplain of the river.

Stores and filling stations begin to line new US 70. Ingles built a shopping center on land they filled in on the northside of 70. Interstate 40 was built on the north side of the railroad track in the ’70s. The project resulted in several hills being at least partially leveled. They had to move a great deal of earth somewhere. They filled in the flood plain where Wallace Mann’s filling station was. A building was moved from Moore General to the property. A night club moved in to the building. They had so many fights and shootings in the place and it was eventually shut down. Every Monday morning, the workers at Cutler-Hammer (later called Eaton) would meet me at the door, wanting to know how many people were shot there over the weekend. The filling in of all this floodplain created a problem. If we had another major flood, where would the water go? We found the answer to that question at the end this past October. 

The late October flood had no room to expand without flooding roads, houses and stores. I live on a hill overlooking the Swannanoa River. My neighbors and I stood in my field and watched the Swannanoa River gradually spread across the filled-in, former floodplain.

The water surrounded Lydia’s Wrecker Building, the church, storage buildings and other buildings and crossed highway 70 until it reach my property. The hill starts at my property line, so the water could not expand any further south until it got to the garage and then the lower end of Edwards Avenue. The water flooded every house until the street went up a small hill before Morgan McPherson’s house. I do not believe any of the houses on the lower end of Edwards Avenue can be saved. The land gets lower after the mulch yard. Everything from the animal hospital to Dunkin’ Donuts was flooded.

The homes on North Avenue, a block north of US 70, were all flooded and destroyed. The Ingles flooded and had to close, and they will need to rebuild. Filling in the floodplain finally caught up with people and made them pay the price.