Lost and Found

A baby’s photo album. Pottery tools. A coffee mug depicting Reba McEntire and a middle-aged man. 

These objects might be somebody’s treasures. But after being pulled from the waterways of Western North Carolina, they are no longer trash. When Hurricane Helene struck in September 2024, it damaged 73,700 homes and swept residents’ personal belongings into the floodwaters. Once the water receded, objects ranging from the meaningful to the mundane were left scattered among the debris. 

The Western North Carolina-based environmental organization MountainTrue started using local grant funds last March to pay 10 people to clean up rivers, including pulling trash out and hauling it away. 

At first, they worked primarily on the Swannanoa River in Asheville’s Biltmore Village and the French Broad River in Madison County. In June, $10 million in funding arrived from the state Department of Environmental Quality, allowing MountainTrue to hire more people so that its cleanup crews could span 12 counties. Their services are free for private landowners on waterfront property.

Now, MountainTrue has 91 workers sorting through river debris across the region. That includes artifact recovery technician Mandy Wallace, a former river guide who now spends several days a week trying to find the owners of the treasures the crews pull out of the muck. 

Wallace works to reunite people with their belongings no matter how small they may seem, like individual photos. “I try to approach it like I don’t know what’s important to someone,” she said. “It’s amazing how small, simple things can become so much.” 

In a little less than a year, MountainTrue’s crews have recovered about 350 items, and Wallace has facilitated 30 “reunions,” as she calls them. She tracks them in monthly reports for DEQ.

Wallace, 55, works out of  MountainTrue’s warehouse in Weaverville, nicknamed “the mothership.” She started out photographing the items on a picnic table in her home backyard. Now her office features a photo box with a white-screen setup so she can photograph objects, as well as shelves full of the cleanup crews’ finds. She posts many of the photographs on the Facebook page MountainTrue – Found After the Flood. “I’m trying to photograph items in the same manner that a museum would,” she said. “I think they deserve that respect.” 

MountainTrue has long participated in regular, volunteer-run river cleanups, but after Helene the additional funding allowed debris removal to become part of its core work. 

When Wallace joined the team in March, she focused on debris removal, too. She arrived at her new role accidentally when, on a cleanup in April at Sweeten Creek and the Swannanoa River, a crew member found an album of baby photos amid the wood, metal, and plastic junk. 

“What was crazy is the majority of the photos were fine,” Wallace recalled, guessing they had been protectively “sealed” in mud. Wallace studied anthropology and worked for several years for an archeological firm, so she asked her boss if she could take the album and a few other items to attempt to locate their owners. Wallace first checked the Facebook page I Found Your Stuff – WNC, where Raleigh resident Jill Holtz has been reconnecting people with lost items as well. Wallace photographed the baby album and posted it in April; soon enough, Caitlin Wright, a mom from Asheville, claimed it. 

“Neither of us could believe it,” Wallace said. “She had been looking on that Facebook page since it went live.”

The photo album had been in storage in an office that her husband’s family owned. “The only thing left is a slab of concrete,” Wright said. Six months after the hurricane, she was scrolling when “I see a mud-caked photo of my baby,” who is now 13. Connecting with Wallace was “phenomenal,” she said. 

“They could have just thrown that in [the trash] and been done with it,” Wright said. 

The Reba McEntire mug found its owner, too: It belongs to the man on the mug—Wright’s father-in-law, Jack Wright Jr., who once met the country singer at a meet-and-greet. “Caitlin’s husband told me he remembers his dad drinking coffee out of that Reba McEntire mug every morning for 30 years,” Wallace said. When the office was destroyed, the mug had been serving as a pencil holder. “We found it a mile down the river,” Wallace said. It wasn’t even chipped.

Wallace maintains a catalog including a description of every item and its dimensions, as well as the longitude and latitude of where it was found. Later this year, MountainTrue hopes to debut an interactive map on its website plotting the origin point of the items and the distance they traveled during the flood. “I’m hopeful this map project will show how all these creeks and rivers are connected—the interconnectedness of all of us,” she said.

To be salvageable for a reunion, objects can’t be moldy, Wallace said. She can dust off dried mud. Some papers are in good condition, but others are disintegrating. Clothing is often too water-damaged to be saved, although she was able to remove buttons, patches, and insignia from a military jacket that was falling apart. “Textiles, at this point, are really difficult,” Wallace explained. Still, she documents them in the catalog in case someone wants them. 

Textiles were primarily what crews recovered alongside a stream in Gerton, Henderson County, in December. Crew leader Donovan Green’s team was working at the site where Helene destroyed the building that housed the Manual Woodworkers and Weavers factory outlet. The company manufactures throw pillows, tapestries, and quilts, all of which were now soggy and sandy, embedded in the banks of Hickory Creek. 

Green’s team descended into the creek with waterproof, insulated gloves, buckets, and grabbers, bypassing fallen branches and upturned rocks and digging through the sand. MountainTrue is in the process of hiring licensed chainsaw operators and arborists to cut through fallen trees and limbs, though crews have been able to use ATVs to pull out larger objects–including, recently, a rusty, red manure spreader found in Gerton. 

Some crew members focus on “surface-level micro-trash,” like pieces of plastic and tires, Green explained. In Hickory Creek, that includes lots of plastic packaging from the store. The site was also littered with large spools of thread, which are particularly dangerous, Green said, because they can tangle up animals and birds. The crews have also unearthed bigger objects such as furniture, doors, kitchen appliances, and rugs. They’ve come across Squishmallows, the popular stuffed animals. Occasionally they find hazardous waste, like a large busted battery. 

The crew spends anywhere from a few days to a few weeks at each site and then relocates, Green said. Her crew has cleaned 15 sites, primarily in Bat Cave and Chimney Rock. The work is slow yet physically demanding, she said. But it’s never boring. 

“Every day, you pick up a log, you find more trash,” Green said. The crew easily fills a dumpster each day. She estimates they’ll be cleaning up the region’s waterways for another year. 

On that mid-December day, Green’s team had unearthed three potential treasures: a pillow with a photo of a kid in a football uniform, a tote bag embossed with a baby’s face, and another tote featuring a white dog. Wallace packed all three in her car to bring back to her office, joining such varied objects as a wooden cane, a mailbox, and a sign for the Craven Street Bridge in Asheville.  

All “reunions” are different, Wallace explained. Some people are eager to tell her stories about the objects. Others don’t want to talk. 

“Crying is part of it, too,” she said, tearing up. “We all do this a little bit.”