A year after Hurricane Helene ripped through the mountains, leaving homes battered and spirits shaken, the people of Weaverville gathered not to mourn what was lost, but to honor what had endured. On Saturday, Sept. 27, nearly a hundred residents filled the Weaverville Community Center, their voices and presence a testament to a town that refused to be broken.
At the heart of the celebration stood a symbol older than the town itself: the red waterwheel of Reems Creek. Since 1790, a wheel had slowly but steadily turned grain into flour on the stream’s banks. But the wheel — whose latest incarnation dated from the 1940s — was no match for Helene, whose waters tore the landmark from its home, leaving it fractured along the creek bank below the old dam.
But at the Helene Recovery & Wheel Recovery Celebration, attendees had a chance to see the new, cherry-red red wheel before its reinstallation…