This is Part 3 of our look at parts of the Upstate, one year after Hurricane Helene.
Landrum is about as far north as you can get and still be in South Carolina, a last small town in the state to visit before you cross the border.
But draw a line from Aiken and you’ll see the path that Hurricane Helene took was a straight shot through Edgefield, Saluda, Newberry, and Laurens counties, right into Landrum, in Spartanburg County.
Landrum was the first small town in the state that reported deaths related to the storm. Two men, Christopher Owens and Gene Pitts, were killed on Sept. 27, 2024, by a fallen tree, while surveying storm damage near Earles Fort Road.
A few hours later came word of a North Carolina man named Ralph Selle, who died trapped in a vehicle stuck in the floodwaters Helene brought to Landrum. Three direct Helene-related deaths recorded on Sept. 27. Landrum was the only city in South Carolina with that distinction.
By Sunday, the sky over Landrum was blue and clear. Main Street was almost entirely untraveled.
It wasn’t quiet. Generators and water pumps and chainsaws whined nonstop. The sounds of broken glass being swept up by merchants trying to clear the debris from their shops. Neighbors comparing scars left on their homes.
That was downtown. The 10 miles surrounding Landrum saw roads blocked with trees; power lines felled; floods that had washed through homes; and a generations-old restaurant shoved from its foundation and broken in two, like a shipwreck eroding on the ocean floor.
A year later, if you stick to Main Street, you wouldn’t know a thing had happened last September. There’s no sign that power remained out around here for nearly two weeks; that businesses couldn’t open their doors to the public until October; that roofs had been wrecked by tree trunks.
But ask Kim Swayngham at Operation Hope if everything is back to normal.
“The effects [of Helene] are still there,” said Swayngham, assistant director for Operation Hope and the founder of Broken Angels Emergency Response. “People still come daily who just cannot recover from it.”
Operation Hope is a ministry thrift shop on Main Street. The shop helps fund an array of services for people who need help – food, blankets, furniture. When Helene hit the city, the Spartanburg County Foundation gave Operation Hope $5,000 to pay for supplies to help clients recover from the storm.
The money, said Operation Hope President Tonya Stone, went fast.
“Alternative fuel was a big one,” Stone said. “Oh my gosh, how much propane we had to give, how much money we had to pay out of this ministry to be able to help people have an alternative fuel source. We also have helped with furniture. Bedding. Food, clothing, blankets, tents, heaters. That was the majority of where that money went because that was what people were needing, to stay warm.”
A year on, that $5,000 has been spent, but clients of Operation Hope, local and not, still need help, Swayngham said.
“We actually still are active to this day,” she said. “We provide food to 21 food pantries, 11 hubs, and six churches. We are in stage three [of Helene recovery efforts] at this point.”
From an 8,000-squar-foot warehouse Operation Hope is still supplying building materials for housing repairs as far as Tennessee.
“We also are preparing for the next storm,” Swayngham said. “So we still network all over the country with items that are needed. We back up any food pantries locally that need food, and we’re still helping families sustain.”
Up the road, just outside of Downtown Landrum, is the sign for Caro-Mi. This is the restaurant that Helene destroyed just over the border in Tryon, N.C.
It’s hard to overstate exactly how storybook the setting of Caro-Mi was in Tryon. An actual log cabin-style building, the restaurant sat at the edge of the Pacolet River since 1957, next to a covered wooden bridge. A trademark of the restaurant was its long front porch, where proprietor Dane Stafford encouraged diners to sit, before or after a meal, and just relax.
This setting in the forest was so conducive to relaxation and rejuvenation that patrons painted pictures of the place. Stafford shows me images on his phone and framed pieces he managed to rescue from the destruction.
Which was immense.
“When I first got to the [Saluda] Valley, I could start seeing some of where the water was and the destruction,” he said. “I thought, this is pretty bad. I first thought the bridge would be gone. I didn't think that the building would be almost destroyed and taken off the foundation. But I got closer and closer and my heart was pounding and I saw it. It was just disbelief.”
While his dinner staff prepped salads and set tables, Stafford showed me more photos of Caro-Mi in its former setting. The current location is homey – it even has the dozens of sports pennants that used to hang around the old walls – and there is a small deck out front.
A long time ago, this location was a Pizza Hut. When the location became open, Stafford said he took it because he felt there was too much history in the name Caro-Mi to let the restaurant disappear.
And he’s grateful to Landrum as a community for welcoming him; for the financial and manpower help he’s gotten to make sure Caro-Mi stays open and does well in its new location.
But it’s not the cabin in the woods, and Stafford said he still feels the loss.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I’m always going to miss that location. If you see some of our paintings that folks did there, the bridge, the river … it was a special setting. Definitely.”
Tomorrow, the last in our four-part series on South Carolina one year following Helene … with a look at communication – and MIS communication – as it played out in Saluda.
