On a mild late-summer afternoon in September, 86-year-old Tom Westall watered the flowers newly planted in the median on Locust Street in downtown Spruce Pine in Mitchell County.
“I love watching things grow,” said Westall, a lifelong Spruce Pine resident whose family operated Westall’s Food Market nearby.
Nearly a year after Tropical Storm Helene sent the North Toe River surging through the downtown, the four-block stretch of Locust Street, known locally as Lower Street, is steadily bustling again.
[Subscribe for FREE to Carolina Public Press’ alerts and weekend roundup newsletters]
Yet the flooding dealt a strong blow to the town’s economy.
With about 15,000 residents, Mitchell County’s economy leans on a few major employers: the county Board of Education, mining giant Sibelco and HCA-owned Blue Ridge Regional Hospital.
Now, however, tourism is a key driver in the future economic stability of Spruce Pine and dozens of other communities throughout the region. Thousands of jobs rely directly or indirectly on access to public lands, crafts and outdoor recreation.
Before Helene, 11.5 million visited the mountains each year, bringing $7.7 billion to the local economy.
“I shed a lot of tears when I came down here after the storm because it had so many memories,” Westall said, including watching the late legendary guitar picker Doc Watson busk at the corner of Lower and Crystal streets decades ago.
After college and a stint in the military, Westall returned home to run the family store. But the era of mom-and-pop groceries in Spruce Pine is long past; Westall’s closed years ago. Today, a year after Helene, Mitchell County has just a single supermarket: Walmart.
The town’s only Ingles, just a few blocks from Lower Street, was flooded during Helene and is shuttered. Spruce Pine’s sixth-largest employer, the town’s Ingles is listed on the company’s website as temporarily closed for repairs. The Ingles Markets corporate office did not respond to requests for a reopening timeline.
Spruce Pine Town Manager Daniel Stines said he is unaware of a firm date for the store’s reopening. “(Ingles) has been fairly silent on the issue,” he said. In the meantime, regular Ingles shoppers are driving to visit Walmart, 6 miles from Lower Street, or to supermarkets in neighboring counties, such as McDowell and Yancey.
For many in Spruce Pine and Mitchell County, food access is just one of several lingering headaches following the storm. Residents are also contending with damaged infrastructure, restricted access to the North Toe River and the struggle to regain economic stability.
Helene isn’t the first tragedy to strike Spruce Pine’s economic hub. In the summer of 2007, a fire ignited by an arsonist tore through downtown, destroying four buildings and displacing at least 10 businesses and several residents.
Once again, Westall is certain the town will rebuild. “It’s getting back to par,” he said.
Too soon to tell in Spruce Pine
In the days after the storm, Cheryl Buchanan stood on Lower Street in a pink T-shirt and black ball cap, taking in the wreckage.
She owns Treasures in the Pines, a bustling emporium that supports more than 60 consignors, who are local artists, antique dealers and sellers of knick-knacks. She’d planned a five-year anniversary celebration on Oct. 9, 2024. Instead, she spent the day emptying her shop, where most of the merchandise was ruined.
“It’s too soon to tell,” she told CPP last year, when asked whether she would reopen.
Buchanan’s father ran the downtown Spruce Pine location of Belk’s store, now the location of DT’s Blue Ridge Java which reopened in August 2025. “Downtown has a place in my heart,” she said recently. “It’s where all the action is and the businesses here are intertwined with each other. We all have a vision to bring it back better.”
After operating at a temporary downtown location on Oak Avenue, or Upper Street, Treasures in the Pines reopened in August 2025, several storefronts from its Helene-flooded space. Buchanan’s business is among the first handful back and a hopeful sign. Instead of 60 vendors, she now has half as many, but she said she’s grateful to be operating again on Lower Street.
The job of nonprofit organization Downtown Spruce Pine’s director, Spencer Bost, is to attract more visitors to shop and dine.
Among his efforts is launching the first Hellbender Festival which debuted during Labor Day weekend on Lower Street. Hellbenders are an endangered species of large salamanders native to rivers in the North Carolina high country. The festival’s theme celebrates river health, Appalachian biodiversity and the resilience of the local community.
Bost wants to showcase what makes Mitchell County stand out, such as its vibrant arts community, its authentic mountain experience and Spruce Pine’s proximity to iconic destinations such as the Blue Ridge Parkway, parts of which remain closed in the county.
The day before the festival in Spruce Pine, Bost struggled to find a parking spot on Lower Street. “That’s a good problem,” he said.
The town’s steady recovery, according to Bost, is remarkable.
He explained that when the North Toe River in Mitchell County surged to a record flood stage, more than 20 shops and restaurants were gutted and CSX Corporation’s Blue Ridge Subdivision rail line suffered extensive damage along a 60-mile stretch in Tennessee and North Carolina, requiring months of repairs. The rail line is expected to reopen later this year.
“It’s important to CSX to get this line back open to restore fluidity on our surrounding lines,” said CSX Director of Track Kevin Haddix in an August press release. “There’s a lot of people around this area that are anxious to see a train run.”
Among them is Bost. “I miss the trains,” he said. Not exactly the roar of locomotives and clattering of coal-brimmed gondolas, but for what they represented: the rhythm, routine and the steady pulse of the small mountain town.
Spruce Pine, in fact, owes its existence to the railroad.
The rail line is a legacy of the town’s 150-year-old mining industry extracting quartz, mica and feldspar from among the richest ore deposits on the planet.
“We like to joke here that everyone has a little bit of Spruce Pine in their pocket,” Bost said while patting his own mobile device whose screen sparkled from the minerals embedded within it.
Spruce Pine and Mitchell County, however, are doubling down on their identity as a tourism economy. County leaders recently hired a consulting firm to create an action plan aimed at drawing more visitors, with one of its priorities to improve access to the North Toe River.
“The Toe is rural, remote, uncrowded, and has outstanding water quality; all we need is better access,” said Christy Thrift, who runs NC Outdoor Adventures, a paddling and outfitting business based in the unincorporated community of Red Hill in Mitchell County.
For more than a decade, Thrift has monitored the river’s health, organized river cleanups, cleared woody debris and managed ecological restoration projects along the Toe. The river’s ecology, she said, was heavily damaged by Helene and by efforts to rebuild infrastructure along the river, including the rail line. But gradually, she’s noticed positive signs that the river is recovering, such as the presence of the riffle beetle, a river health indicator species.
“After the storm, I only saw a handful of them,” she said. “Now, I’m seeing hundreds of them in certain areas.”
People are also starting to return to the river to fish, paddle and tube, but their business is down about 30% compared to last summer. In the future, Thrift thinks that drawing more people to recreate on the river will be a key component to Mitchell County’s image as a recreational destination.
But currently, she said, “there’s no public access” to the Toe.
According to Thrift, 98% of the North Toe’s riverbank is privately owned. The storm damaged public access points that the NC Wildlife Resources Commission managed.
The town of Spruce Pine is exploring partnerships with the NC Department of Transportation to provide safe river access near state-owned bridges and is examining properties purchased through the Federal Emergency Management Agency-funded hazard mitigation program as potential public access points.
Currently the town is considering designs to replace its waste treatment facility with a more modern system. One possibility is moving the plant uphill and out of the flood plain in order to make space for recreational river access.
Stines explained that much of the work rebuilding infrastructure by city staff has been behind the scenes, including river access, reopening parks or cobbling together solutions to keep the waste water plant in operation.
Another was a month-long around-the-clock project to bore a water line through granite bedrock underneath the North Toe River.
Stines has discovered that the recovery from Helene will stretch on for years.
“It’s very time consuming,” Stines said. “People ask us, you know, when will the pedestrian bridge be back or when will you fix a culvert? We just can’t give the hard dates that people want. But trust me, we sympathize with the needs and desires of people who live here.”
Despite the challenges, he’s hopeful. Spruce Pine, he said, has a “yank yourself up by your bootstraps mentality. The community effort is so strong here. I think the future is really bright.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may republish our stories for free, online or in print. Simply copy and paste the article contents from the box below. Note, some images and interactive features may not be included here.
