Nine months before anyone on Main Street in Chimney Rock, North Carolina could reopen a shop, a different kind of visitor started rolling into town: buses full of Amish and Mennonite volunteers who had never seen the place before Hurricane Helene tore it apart.

A Storm That Erased a Mountain Town

Hurricane Helene struck western North Carolina in September 2024, sending the Broad River over its banks and through Chimney Rock's Main Street.

Homes, bridges and businesses across the small tourist town and surrounding valley were destroyed or badly damaged, and the town stayed closed to visitors for months afterward.

Buses Full of Volunteers

Starting at the beginning of 2025, a Pennsylvania-based group called Great Needs Trust began sending Amish volunteers south.

Buses carrying 35 to 75 people a week made the trip to hard-hit towns including Hendersonville, Black Mountain and Chimney Rock.

Mennonite Disaster Service sent its own crews from Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and a separate Amish group from Indiana worked nearby in Bat Cave.

None of the volunteers were paid.

One of them, Amos Stoltzfus, told local media, "It just fills my heart with joy, watching people get their life back again."

Amish or Mennonite volunteer men in straw hats and plain clothing framing the wooden walls of a small tiny home at an outdoor construction site in the North Carolina mountains, daytime, real workers visible mid-task — Volunteer crews spent the winter framing tiny homes for families left without housing.

A Foundation for a 125-Year-Old Inn

Over the winter, the volunteers framed dozens of tiny homes, each roughly the size of a large storage shed, to give displaced families a warm place to sleep.

They also took on bigger jobs.

At the Broad River Inn, built in 1900, Helene's floodwaters had washed out the entire back half of the foundation.

Amish crews built a form by hand and poured a new reinforced concrete foundation underneath it.

Co-owner Kristen Sottile said the inn, which had already survived a flood in 1916 and a fire in 1930, would not have been rebuilt without the help.

"We were fortunate enough to have the help of Spokes of Hope bringing the Amish community," she said.

The Last Tiny Home

Almost a year after Hurricane Helene, the volunteers delivered their final tiny home to a Vietnam veteran, one of the many hurricane victims the project had been built to house.

Volunteer groups working in the region said in spring 2025 that repairs would likely continue for another six months to a year past that point.

The buses kept coming anyway, week after week, from people who had nothing to gain from a town they had never visited before the flood.

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