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Beacon Village Swannanoa: Hurricane Helene Relief and Restoration
Help us restore our community.
Beacon village Community updates, September 22, 2025
Families are Starting to Move Back in their Homes!
Last week, a fifth family had the blessing on their restored home and will move back in shortly.
Our community is so excited to see the progress on the street. There are another four houses that we hope families can move back into in the next month or so. Progress depends on the availability of materials, volunteer labor, and funds to cover the cost of the plumbers and electricians. As the summer has ended, volunteer teams are fewer, so we may need to pay for insulation and sheetrock installers. We are so thankful for community organizations working on houses and for volunteers coming from all over the USA to rebuild our homes.
Next Steps
Work in Beacon Village is incremental. There are still houses on Edwards Avenue that have yet to begin reconstruction. Other houses are waiting for volunteers with the right skill set for their particular needs. There are also still many occupied homes in both upper and lower Beacon Village that have major damage and we are not able to address their needs (yet), and there are many houses that we hear about through the grapevine, but the homeowners feel there are others in the village with greater needs so they are not contacting us. We are working to find everyone in the village who needs assistance and ensure that all Beacon Village residents have a safe home with no residual damage from Hurricane Helene.
Volunteer Opportunities
- We need skilled carpenters to work on reframing the interiors of houses.
- We are also ready for insulation and sheetrock installation.
- We need many truckloads of fill dirt and skid steers (with drivers) to replace and regrade 12 back yards that were washed away.
- Once the backyards are graded, we need trees to plant behind the houses to provide a buffer between the yards and the four lane road behind the houses. We also need landscaping in front of homes.
- We need 75-100 yards of drainpipes to be replaced from gutters on the street to the culverts. Our 100 year old storm water drainage system is full of mud and has collapsed under ground.
- We need windows as ours are full of silt and must be replaced.
- We need cleanup and reinforcement of mountain stream and creek beds that were washed away and continue to erode, threatening buildings close to them.
- We need to mitigate a chronic water problem behind eight houses that was severely exacerbated by the storm. A creek that flooded in heavy rains is now constantly flooding these back yards and threatening crawl spaces. We have a temporary fix with a portable sump pump in one yard, but need stream management on a larger scale to address this problem.
- We will need construction materials for quite some time: lumber, insulation, sheetrock, electrical and plumbing supplies, tile, flooring, bathroom and kitchen fixtures, etc.
If you can help with any of these items, please send us a note through the contact form at the bottom of this page.
Donate
The Beacon Village Restoration Fund, DBA Save Beacon Village is a 501(c)3 not for profit organization. Donations are distributed directly to residents to assist with rent in temporary homes as people are also paying for the mortgages on homes in which they cannot live.
Click the link at the top of this web page to make a tax-deductible donation.
Donations of gift cards can be mailed to Save Beacon Village, c/o PO Box 102, Arden, NC 28704 and will be distributed to residents.
About Save Beacon Village
Our Story
The goal of Save Beacon Village is to rebuild homes flooded in Hurricane Helene, beginning with the street you see in these photos on which houses were submerged - water over the gutters and neighbors rescued from roofs. This community is not is a flood plain and is a four hour drive from the closest ocean. Residents did not have flood insurance and never expected their homes to be destroyed by a hurricane.
Please check back with us regularly. We will post updates as we get the houses dried out and restored . We are happy to report we have been approved as a 501(c)3 organization. We distribute funds from our GOFUNDME page, the donation link on this page, and other resources directly to the residents.
What is Beacon Village?
Beacon Village is a quiet, quaint neighborhood of mill houses in Swannanoa, NC that was devastated by Hurricane Helene on Friday, September 27, 2024. The village was originally built by Beacon Blanket Manufacturing in the late1920's. Beacon was once the largest blanket manufacturer in the world and today many Beacon blankets are collector’s items. Beacon transformed Swannanoa into a mill town with company-owned houses and company-sponsored entertainment and sports teams. Beacon supplied blankets to the US military in World War II and were in many households in the US until 2002 when the mill closed and then burned down in 2023. Several homes are still owned by families who purchased them from Beacon, and new families have moved in over the years. Recent years have had much renovation and revitalization in these houses.
Thank you Swannanoa Valley Museum for this information!
Before and After
