By CATHARIN SHEPARD
News-Argus Staff Writer

Jewel Kilpatrick often walks her dogs at the park across the street from her home, enjoying the mild autumn days at the meticulously maintained playground dotted with candy-colored slides and monkey bars.

The peaceful park is a powerful contrast to the way the property looked 10 years ago when the brown waters of the Neuse River came creeping over its banks, washing away homes, devastating farmers and destroying many hopes for the future.

Mrs. Kilpatrick was mayor of Seven Springs on Thursday, Sept. 16, 1999, when Hurricane Floyd passed through Eastern North Carolina, causing deceptively minor damage at first, but packing a follow-up punch of flooding that still has the community reeling even a decade later.

Seven Springs was always small, with a population of about 180 people before the hurricane, but the little community tucked away in the southeastern corner of Wayne County lost more than half its residents after the flood.

And despite the quiet idyll of the playground across the street, Mrs. Kilpatrick knows better than anyone the sad reality of how it came to be there.

“It’s all bad, I don’t remember anything good that happened. It was a terrible time. I don’t even like to think about it,” she said.

During the hurried evacuation, Mrs. Kilpatrick helped direct traffic and assisted people loading up their possessions to escape the rising water. But her own home on Azalea Street was not spared from damage.

“I had four feet of water in my house, up to the top of my cabinets,” she said.

Mrs. Kilpatrick returned, tore her house down and had a new modular home put up in its place. Like many of the people who chose to come back, she was born and raised in Seven Springs and knew that she wanted to return after the flood despite the proven risk.

“Seven Springs is my home town, and I love Seven Springs, and that’s why (I returned),” Mrs. Kilpatrick said. ”But if we ever have another flood, I would not try to come back any more.”

The flood waters destroyed the homes of many town residents, climbing up over the doorknobs, windowsills and even higher in some areas. The moldy, boarded-up skeletons of a few flooded-out properties still lurk aimlessly around town, growing impressive collections of kudzu. Suspiciously bare lots are interspersed between trees and sheds, grass long grown over the empty places residents once called home.

Many of the occupied houses in town today, including Mrs. Kilpatrick’s, are perched on foundations raised high above the water line to prevent damage from any future flooding. By last count, 86 people live in the town limits of Seven Springs.

Nearly 100 other residents never returned.

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Seven Springs is the oldest settlement in Wayne County and was once a vital, though quiet, town. It was home to two hotels reputed to have played host to rich and famous visitors seeking the town’s restorative hot springs, which gave Seven Springs its name. The village was the site of the 1862 Civil War Battle of Whitehall, and today the town is very much attuned to its history.

Unfortunately, its recent history is still strongly directing the flow of Seven Springs’ development.

Stephen Potter, born and raised in Seven Springs, not only returned to the town after the flood but also ran for mayor after Mrs. Kilpatrick stepped down. He still clearly remembers the series of events of the fall of ‘99.

“It was a terrible time. Looking back, I really don't think any of us initially realized the magnitude of the event as it unfolded, at least at first,” Potter said. “The first warnings we got were that the pending flood could be as much as two feet higher than what we had experienced with Hurricane Fran. Well, I had more than that to spare at my home, which had been here over 100 years and never had floodwater inside it.”

He put his furniture and appliances on blocks, just in case, thinking that even in a worst case scenario, the flood water wouldn’t be able to damage his belongings that way.

But by late Saturday afternoon, Potter realized he and the other town residents were in trouble.

“The river wasn't expected to crest until the following Thursday, as I recall, and the water was already in my driveway. So the next morning, with the aid of family and the National Guard, we moved everything out of my home,” he said. “The following Tuesday, I was standing at the end of Main Street next to Highway 55 as the water crossed over the threshold of my front door and entered my home.”

Potter vividly remembers the feelings of helplessness at being unable to stop the progression of the flooding. By the time the river crested, the water was up to the windows of the home that had been in his family for generations.

“My great aunt, Gladys Potter, lived here all her life. It was like losing her all over again,” he said.

After the water receded, money for the town “poured in” from private donations, and flood insurance paid for the loss of his own home. Not long after, the Federal Emergency Management Agency also became involved, but the agency’s actions have proven to be a mixed blessing for the longterm survival of Seven Springs.

“Much of what they offered was truly a benefit to our residents, I do know that many were able to remain on their property in trailers provided by the agency,” Potter said. “Later came the buyouts, which have had a lasting, albeit negative, impact on our village.”

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After the flood, the residents, businesses and churches of Seven Springs were faced with the difficult decision of whether to stay or leave.

Mildred Smith had hoped that storing her furniture in her son’s horse trailer might keep it safe, but her property in downtown Seven Springs is very close to the river. She lost many of her possessions, and ended up staying in a FEMA-provided mobile home from November of 1999 until May of 2000 while the home where she had lived nearly all of her life was gutted and refurbished. But despite the hardship, she didn’t consider leaving Seven Springs.

“You know, when you’ve lived here all your life — I have, just about — you just wanted to come back,” Mrs. Smith said. “A lot of people didn’t.”

Members of the Seven Springs Baptist Church, founded in 1891, decided not to risk another flood. The church occupied its white-trimmed brick chapel on Azalea Street for nearly 40 years, but at the height of the flooding, more than three feet of water rose in the sanctuary, ruining the contents and damaging the old wood.

Groups such as the North Carolina Baptist Men and other volunteers worked to clean up the church and parsonage, but in November 1999 the church members voted to build a new facility away from the danger of flooding. The new Seven Springs Baptist Church, located outside of town on N.C. 55, was completed in early 2002. Many of the church members moved away from the area altogether.

Two local businesses that reopened as quickly as possible were the Seven Springs Restaurant and Mae’s Restaurant, both on Main Street within shouting distance of the river. The Seven Springs Restaurant restaurant fed many people while they were still waiting to go home, a recovery process that took months for most, and in some cases, almost a year.

The restaurants are still popular hangouts for local farmers, who also suffered fallout from the flood. Farmer John Lynch lost about 40,000 young chickens in two of his chicken houses not far outside of town. The structures themselves were repairable, but the chickens, valued at about $3 each at the time, all drowned. Today, Lynch still uses the land that flooded for farming operations.

“Don’t really have any choice. I already had the houses,” he said. “I think it was a once in a lifetime thing.”

However, when the time came to build new chicken houses, he put them on higher ground, Lynch said.

Field crop farmers lost much of their own livelihoods in the flood. John Lynch’s brother Jerry Lynch lost about 100 acres of soybeans after Hurricane Floyd. Not only was the crop ruined, but after the water receded, it left a thick layer of muddy corn stalks piled on top of the soybeans — even though corn was not a crop Lynch‘s farm produced. He was never able to figure out where the corn came from, but presumed there were other farmers in the area who had been just as unlucky as his family was.

The flooding also made it difficult, and impossible for some, to get to work every day. Doug Casey was chief of the town’s volunteer fire department at the time of the flood, and said he lost his job because he spent so many days coordinating the evacuation and overseeing operations during the flood.

“I’ve seen this little old town flood three times, and this was the roughest one I’ve seen,” he said.

Casey’s home six miles outside of town didn’t flood, but it became increasingly hard for Casey and emergency workers to get around as the water covered the roads. When a National Guard Humvee started flooding as a Guard member drove him across one road, he called a halt to the travel and told his crews to start using boats.

“It was almost up to where I couldn’t get nowhere,” he said. “It was ... getting to where I didn’t have a way of getting around.”

The fire department in the middle of downtown Seven Springs was among the flooded buildings. With the help of other departments, the volunteers were able to clean up and save the white-boarded facility, and the department still operates from the same building today.

And likewise, Casey doesn’t plan to leave the Seven Springs area, despite the flood danger and the changes in the town after Hurricane Floyd.

“This is home. You just don’t want to leave home,” he said. “It’s been my home for 61 years. ... Years ago when I was growing up, this was a thriving little town. You could come here on the weekends and have a big time. But you can’t do it nowadays, because there ain’t nothing down here.”

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Hurricane Floyd and the resulting FEMA buyouts changed the landscape of Seven Springs. Although the buyouts provided a fresh start for those who stayed and were left with few of their belongings, one look at the empty lots scattered around town is all it takes to grasp the situation.

“FEMA wasn’t that good. They were nice and they helped, but there was a lot of stuff they could have done better. Everybody knows that,” Mrs. Kilpatrick said.

Although FEMA purchased many ruined properties, tore down the wrecked houses and turned the bare land over to the town, there are stringent regulations about what can and cannot be built on the resulting lots.

No businesses. No homes. No four-sided buildings at all, with the exception, perhaps, of a public bathroom.

“Today we find ourselves struggling to maintain our financial viability. Our tax base was significantly impacted by the loss of 11 residential properties that participated in the FEMA buyouts,” Potter said. “Then again, that was the goal of the FEMA buyouts, to move all of us out of the flood plain, and thus, out of the village.”

The playground on Azalea Street was the result of a town effort to do something with one of the leftover properties besides simply spending money to keep the grass and weeds cut short.

“That’s one (thing) that I did when I was mayor that I was proud of, and the flood helped us do that,” Mrs. Kilpatrick said. “I can see children, I live right close to the park and I can see them playing and it’s wonderful. I wish everybody in town appreciated it as much as I do.”

The park was constructed using a matching grant from the state Parks and Recreation Department that Mrs. Kilpatrick sought shortly after the flood. The land it occupies was once the site of her neighbor’s home.

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Despite the losses, the town is making the most of what it has to work with. The old Baptist church on Azaela Street, flooded with waist-deep water and bought out by FEMA, today is undergoing renovations to turn it into the new Seven Springs town hall. The town keeps the empty lots trimmed and neat, and holds special events such as a Halloween movie marathon in the park, a yearly Christmas parade and the Ole Timey Days every spring to attract people to the tiny community. The residents who stayed still have hope for Seven Springs, the home they sacrificed so much to keep.

“In spite of the flood and in spite of FEMA, we have survived, and are once again beginning to thrive. We've gone 10 years without another flood event now,” Potter said. “...Anyway, here we stand, enduring in spite of all.”

But not even the most dedicated want to go through another Hurricane Floyd.

“I hope I’m high enough. If I’m not, I will move out of town,” Mrs. Kilpatrick said.