For more than a century, the Craig family felt safe on their land in western North Carolina, where mountains covered in maple and hickory trees shielded them during storms.
Their surroundings were so serene that generations of Craigs stayed and settled on the outskirts of Fairview, N.C., near Asheville. Eventually, about 75 members of the extended family lived as neighbors, most in an area roughly the size of a Walmart parking lot.
They called it Craigtown.
But on the morning of Sept. 27, as Hurricane Helene loosened the region’s already saturated ground with more heavy rain, two landslides thundered down the mountains and straight into Craigtown. Within seconds, multiple homes were devoured by boulders and trees. Eleven members of the Craig family were killed, their bodies found days later beneath mud or near blueberry patches miles away.
“You can hardly stand to look at it, to see your neighborhood and your family wiped out,” Larry Craig, 75, said on a recent cold afternoon, looking at the new view from his front porch. Where there once were homes and gardens was now a wide furrow of dirt, as if a giant had swiped his foot across it.
At a time of year meant for family gatherings and holiday celebrations, the Craigs, nearly all deeply religious Baptists, are clasping their hands in prayer and asking: Can God help their shattered hearts and land?
The storm killed more than 100 people in North Carolina, caused $53 billion in damage and plunged thousands of residents into economic crisis. The random nature of the disaster in Craigtown — perfectly untouched mobile homes beside fissures filled with crushed walls — only deepened the survivors’ grief. Why had they been spared, they asked, when their cousins, aunts and uncles had not?
On a recent Sunday, the Rev. Ronnie Harris, the pastor of Craigtown’s only church, Chestnut Hill Baptist Church, placed boxes of tissues at every pew. He had married into the Craig family, falling in love with their devotion to one another.
Before the service began, people took turns sharing what was on their minds. Pastor Harris, 72, assured the men in particular that it was good to grieve and let God comfort them.
“It’s only because of His mercy that we’re here today,” Larry Craig said, wiping his eyes. “He could’ve taken any one of us out. And some, He almost did.”
Pastor Harris’s thoughts turned to the three relatives who had tried to save him after one of the landslides crashed into his truck while he was in it, hurtling it 100 yards before it hit a poplar tree. He had spent many days kneeling in prayer, thinking about those men: Tony Garrison, a volunteer firefighter; Brandon Ruppe, Mr. Garrison’s nephew; and Dylan Garrison, Mr. Garrison’s son.
Before the men reached the pastor that morning, another mass of trees and murky gunk had slid down, burying them. Tony Garrison, 51, and Mr. Ruppe, 37, were killed. Cries for help from Dylan, in his 20s, could barely be heard through the downpour, but he survived. Pastor Harris had sat scrunched in his truck, dazed as his boots filled with water and blood from the gashes in his shins.
“We’ve suffered loss of loved ones,” he said now, addressing about two dozen of his relatives. “Many ask: ‘Can God restore this land to what it was? Can God put our lives back together? Can God really bring things back together, really restore us back to some kind of normalcy?’”
He assured them that God could. And still, when they looked outside, it was hard not to flinch. One family member had nearly suffered heart failure after seeing the wreckage. Another who identified the bodies now had trouble sleeping. A young man who had tried to save someone with CPR started seeing a therapist, because the memory was also keeping him up at night.
“You wonder why,” Wade Wright, the chief of the local Garren Creek Fire Department and a Craig family member, said as he looked at the ruined land from his truck recently. “Nobody will ever know.”
Nestled in a roughly square-mile valley at high elevation, Craigtown — officially part of Fairview — had rarely, if ever, worried about natural disasters. And the Craigs had felt nourished by their surroundings for decades, Mr. Wright said.
The children would fish, ride four-wheelers and fill their plates with venison at family cookouts. They had never been wealthy, but they had a multitude of apple trees, deer and hogs to hunt, and second and third cousins living minutes away.
They had their church, perched on a small hill. And they had their Fire Department, where many of the men volunteered.
“We’ve always looked out for each other — that’s what this place is,” said Jesse Craig, whose parents, Ronald, 68, and Sandra, 69, were killed in the landslides. He went to the spot where their house had stood. In the hardened dirt was a bamboo fishing pole that his father had made.
He remembered how his father, an expert woodworker, and his mother, “funny, glowing but stern,” had told him early on the morning of the hurricane that the rain was bad, but that they would probably be fine.
“This has all been like a bad dream,” Jesse said.
Philip Prince, a geologist who has researched landslide hazard assessment and studied what happened in Craigtown, said that what struck the area was a river of heavy, liquefied soil, boulders, mud, gravel and logs, all moving downhill at up to 30 miles per hour.
“It’s like the F5 tornado of the Appalachians — the most powerful, focused event,” he said, referring to the strongest category of a tornado.
Exactly when and how the first Craigs settled on this land is uncertain, but most family members agree that three brothers from somewhere up north purchased the first parcel in the late 19th century. Those Craig men married women from the nearby Wright family, and Craigtown sprouted from there.
In 1954, the family built their church, Larry Craig said, and “people started giving their life to God.”
Gary Kirkendall, 55, who describes himself as “half-Craig,” says he has tried to find comfort in the possibility that when the landslide hit, his relatives who were killed did not suffer.
“It’s pulled us even tighter together, even closer, if that can be possible,” he said of the survivors.
They wonder what should be done about the swath of their land devastated by the landslides. The sight triggers traumatic memories, but eventually, they hope, new homes will be built for the survivors who lost theirs, or perhaps a memorial.
Another question hung in the air at a recent evening prayer group for the men of Craigtown, their fingers still calloused from helping clear debris that had been stacked 20 feet high. How would they get through the holidays?
“You think about Christmas, there’s going to be an empty spot there on that table,” Pastor Harris told the group.
Missing from the gatherings would be Freddie Pack, 66, an electrician, and his wife, Terri Pack, 60, who taught Sunday school; Angie Craig, 64, who loved animals and gardening; Lois Craig Souther, 73, who adored hummingbirds; and her husband, James Willard Souther, 73, a mechanic.
Also gone were Daniel Wright, 82, a mason who loved to laugh and tease his family, and his wife, Evelyn Wright, who relatives described as warm.
The men took turns sharing their worries.
“Feeling that empty space and that void — well, we all know what a void feels like right now,” said Brian Reynolds, a close friend of the Craig family. “But I can’t help but feel like it’s just different when they’re taken like this, just sudden and unexpected.”
The others nodded silently.
“But I’m thankful to be here,” Mr. Reynolds said. “I’ve missed you fellas, this brotherhood.”
Then Trevor Ballew, 28, who recently married into the family, offered a sliver of good news: He and his wife were expecting a baby girl in January. The couple’s newly purchased home had been destroyed in the landslides, but they were adamant about staying in Craigtown, or at least very near it.
“Y’all pray for me,” Mr. Ballew said. “And I’ll pray for y’all.”
The post A Large Family Built Its Own Little Town. A Hurricane Killed 11 of Them. appeared first on New York Times.
