Home Care In Black Mountain, NC

Few educational institutions glow as radiantly in the American imagination as Black Mountain College. From 1933 to 1957, a motley rabble of outsiders and luminaries turned an anonymous plot of land in the shadow of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains into a singular site for learning, one that was more social laboratory than college campus.

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The longevity of its legacy is most easily explained by the figures who contributed to an institution that placed art at its center. Josef Albers, the Bauhaus pioneer and color master, was the inaugural head of art. His wife, the abstract artist Anni Albers, taught textiles. Buckminster Fuller led design classes and experimented with geodesic domes. John Cage taught music—his provocative and silent piece 4’33 (1952) was inspired by the all-white Robert Rauschenberg canvases that hung from the dining room ceiling. Merce Cunningham led dance sessions, Willem and Elaine de Kooning lessons in art. And so on.

Another distinction of Black Mountain College was how thoroughly it bucked the conventions of education. There was no board of trustees, no dean, and no president. Students graduated when they wanted. There were no grades, no curricula, and a minimal hierarchy separating students and teachers. Tuition, board, and lodging fees were low with roughly half the student body receiving scholarships.

Founded while America was gripped by the Great Depression and closing down prior to the social rebellions of the 1960s, Black Mountain College was countercultural before the fact and radical without the friction so often associated with the word. And it was for this transgressive spirit that the institution was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1950s. It was, after all, the height of McCarthyism.

Former students from the period have long told stories of conspicuously dressed agents wandering the lake-side grounds (men they were fond of pulling pranks on). Then in 2015, a declassified FBI file showed that the bureau had indeed compiled a secret report on Black Mountain College. It deemed the institution “a very unusual type of school” and one that potentially posed an “internal security” threat to the country (read: potential communists).

The report followed roughly a decade of FBI interest in the college with previous investigations focused on a string of faculty members. The anthropology professor Paul Radin was suspected of being a communist operative; Fuller received a file, so too did the writer Charles Olson, who served as the college’s leader in the 1950s and carried the weight of investigation uneasily.

With low fees and a declining number of students, Black Mountain College had long struggled financially. In the 1950s, it increasingly turned to funds from the G.I. Bill in a bid to remain solvent. This prompted suspicions from the Veterans Administration, which believed the college was receiving funding without merit given its various unorthodoxies, including, most straightforwardly, how sporadically students attended class.

The VA’s position triggered two developments. First, the State Board of Education of North Carolina withdrew its approval, thereby making it ineligible for G.I. funding. Second, it led to the 1956 FBI investigation following the advice of a regional attorney for the VA. The bureau interviewed some of the college’s military veteran students to assess whether or not they were receiving adequate teaching instruction to warrant VA funding.

The FBI report noted the instruction was indeed bizarre, such that “a student may do nothing all day and in the middle of the night may decide he wants to paint or write… and may call upon his teachers at this time for guidance.” The file was shut within a matter of months concluding that “any effort to prove non-compliance could not be successfully met.” All the same, the damage was done and by the end of the year Black Mountain College closed due to lack of money.

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Black Mountain Fire Chief John Coffey has seen disasters before. It comes with the job.

But he said Tropical Storm Helene “by far has been the hardest thing” he has had to do in his career.

“It’s just different,” Coffey said. “Maybe it hits hard because we live here. The places I deployed to wasn’t my home, so I didn’t really absorb it as much, but when there’s people you know or places you’ve been that no longer exist, it hits a little different.”

Swannanoa Fire Chief Anthony Penland has never seen anything like Helene, either. He said the closest thing he has seen was the flooding of 2004 when Hurricanes Frances and Ivan hit Western North Carolina in a short period of time.

Penland said that during the 2004 flooding, the water hit the bottom of the bridge connecting U.S. 70 to Old U.S. 70. During Helene, the water was over the roofs of buildings.

In the days leading up to the Sept. 27 storm, Coffey and Penland said they directed their departments in warning people who lived in areas most prone to flooding.

In Black Mountain, this meant going to door-to-door with people living along Flat Creek, along North Fork Road and down to Tanglewood. Penland said he sent his team around Swannanoa, up and down U.S. 70 and Old U.S. 70 and Franklin Road. He said he went to the KOA Campground himself.

More:Tropical Storm Helene 'humbling' experience for Swannanoa campground manager

Both chiefs said their teams went to tell those in these areas to evacuate because flooding was likely.

Still, with the preparation and knowledge of what occurred in 2004, Coffey said everyone in Helene’s affected area was “outmatched.”

“We were outmatched,” Coffey said. “The whole county, the whole state, everyone anywhere along this storm that was affected. No one was anticipating landslides, no one was anticipating the amount of damage we sustained.”

Coffey said a big challenge was getting over a hurdle after the storm took out all communication.

“Unfortunately at one point when the hurricane actually hit, we lost all communication,” Coffey said. “Both radio and phone. We lost power. It literally threw us back over 150 years.”

In response, Coffey said the Black Mountain Fire Department was forced to hand deliver messages and operated like that until communications were restored.

Despite this lack of communication, the departments continued to respond to calls. Coffey said the Black Mountain Fire Department brought 450 people to safety.

In Swannanoa, Penland said the department responded to 165 dispatch calls, but this does not include people calling into the fire station directly or walking up for help. Coffey said the Black Mountain Fire Department operated in a similar way, following leads as they came in.

At one point, both fire departments were asked to evacuate. Penland said the Swannanoa Fire Department drove around Swannanoa, moving several times, looking for higher ground.

“Our last truck actually had to drive through the floodwaters to get to safety,” Penland said.

On their way back to the station, the department rescued 25 people from the Swannanoa Ingles where Penland said there was more than 5 feet of water in the parking lot.

Before the storm hit, Coffey said a task force was established in Black Mountain consisting of the fire, police and public works departments. A command center was established that would be the headquarters of response in Black Mountain in the weeks following Helene.

Coffey said he even pulled in retired firefighters still living in Black Mountain to help in the command center. Other Black Mountain residents volunteered their services to the town during the aftermath of the storm.

Penland and Coffey said they would change very little about their departments' responses to Helene, looking back now more than three months after the storm hit Western North Carolina.

“Our focus was always on the community,” Penland said. “Even while we were out waiting out the storm in a parking lot, our focus was on the community.”

Coffey said he wants the public to know that he and the rest of the department always had the interests of the community in mind.

“The one thing I would want them to know is we were determined not to let them down,” Coffey said. “We were determined not to fail.”

More:Bridge in Swannanoa on US 70 reopens after being damaged Tropical Storm Helene

Karrigan Monk is the Swannanoa Valley communities reporter for Black Mountain News, part of the USA TODAY Network. Reach her at [email protected].