Old Fort Loops: A Soundtrack of Resilience After Hurricane Helene

How does one recover from and process a generational storm like Helene? For UNC Press author Scott Huffard and his friends, the answer was through music. When Helene swept through the Banner Elk area a year ago, high winds toppled trees, mudslides blocked town roads while surging floodwaters scoured yards, ravaged homes, and destroyed the town sewer and water system. Huffard teaches at Lees-McRae College, a private school in Banner Elk which had to shift to online operations for over 5 weeks. The band’s frontman Trevor Brown lost almost his entire backyard when it was swallowed up by Shawneehaw Creek. As band members trickled back into the area and took stock of the damage, they also kicked their music into high gear. They channeled energy into writing songs, formed the band Spell of Leaves, and began playing local shows in the area. 

              “Old Fort Loops,” the first single from the band’s forthcoming EP is both a commemoration of the storm and an outgrowth of Huffard’s work as a historian and author. The Old Fort Loops are the section of railroad track between Black Mountain and Old Fort, where the railroad gains over 1000 feet of elevation on its way to Asheville. Built in the 1870s as part of the Western North Carolina Railroad, the project was an engineering marvel that opened Asheville to tourism and development as the so-called “Land of the Sky.” But it came at a heavy cost of human life from the convict laborers who built the line. Perhaps most devastated was the tunnel collapse immortalized in the folk standard “Swannanoa Tunnel,” a ballad referenced in the first verse of “Old Fort Loops.” Huffard first learned about the horrors of Swannanoa Tunnel and convict labor while researching his 2019 UNC Press book Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South, and he is turning his obsession with train songs into a second book (forthcoming from UNC Press) on songs about famous engineer Casey Jones. 

Unfortunately, the Old Fort Loops and so many surrounding communities took the brunt of the storm last year. It thus is fitting that the end of the song unfolds a final layer of tragedy–past and present floods that have ravaged the mountains. But in the end, the hope is that a message of resilience can come through. Just as the bandmembers and communities have bounced back from the storm, the Norfolk Southern also plans to reconstruct this iconic piece of NC railroad history. 

“Old Fort Loops” is available now on all major streaming platforms. You can also learn more about the band and hear the song at spellofleaves.com.