A generator, a camp stove and lots of donated water helped Daniel Lancaster open a new coffee shop in Swannanoa, just weeks after Hurricane Helene demolished much of the town’s business district.
The small valley town, about 15 minutes outside of Asheville, was one of the places hardest hit by Helene. The storm shocked Swannanoa residents with historic flooding, landslides and wind damage.
A drive along its main artery, Highway 70, reveals ravaged homes and broken roads. Parking lots that once housed small businesses are now aid centers. Displaced people are sleeping in campers and tents. There’s storm debris everywhere.
Since the storm, the street has shut down to vehicles and it’s filled with volunteers distributing free food, clothes, medical services, and now — thanks to Short Sleeves, pay-what-you-can coffee.
Short Sleeves Coffee opened four weeks ago in Swannanoa’s downtown district.
Lancaster says the model has helped keep him, his family and his one employee afloat.
It certainly wasn’t how Lancaster expected his grand opening to look. Before the storm hit, he was still working on turning an empty building into a business.
“We had just gotten permits. We had gone through six months of preparing to open and we were probably in our final month and a half until opening – and then the hurricane hit,” Lancaster said. “So it was a minor setback to say the least.”
The fallout from Helene stopped his business plan in its tracks. But Lancaster was determined to open anyway. So he got creative – and decided to build a literal hole in the wall.
“I was just sitting here one day, kind of scratching my head trying to figure out – what does life look like now? What does it look like to open a business in a town that's lost a lot of its commerce district and with many homes gone?”
He knew that coffee would make things a little better, he said.
In Short Sleeves’ first few weeks, Lancaster used a generator to roast the beans and a camp stove to prepare cups of pour over coffee. He created a table and shelves out of plywood and set them up inside his gutted building. And then he invited Swannanoa residents in.
News of the coffee shop spread quickly.
Lancaster said it’s become the community’s coffee shop. Since opening as a bare bones counter service spot, community members have dropped off furniture, boxes of sugar, coffee stirrers and gas-powered heaters for those chilly mornings.
“Somebody last week said ‘this is the first normal thing I've done since this happened,’” Lancaster said. “And then someone else a few days ago was, like, ‘I forgot about the flood for, like, 10 minutes’. That was really special.”
Evan Curry and Liz Gundlach are new Short Sleeves’ customers. On a chilly afternoon, they picked up two cold brews. The couple both work as therapists. Gundlach said that work has been exhausting lately for both of them.
“This is the first week of really seeing my full caseload and I’m really tired. Just really, really tired,” she said.
Despite a return to work, things are far from normal in Swannanoa, Gundlach said. Every day she drives past scenes of devastation.
“Each time you're just kind of faced with that level of devastation and that kind of stark reminder. It's just difficult,” she said.
But being able to grab coffee helps Gundlach and her partner, Curry, feel a little bit more normal. Going to get coffee together was part of their routine before the storm hit, and now it can be part of their routine once more, they said.
Lancaster said he plans to continue the pay-what-you-can coffee model through the rest of the month. This week, his team also resumed the renovations that have been on pause since Helene struck.
There’s no firm timeline for when the shop will finish its renovations, but the team has started cutting concrete. Next week, they plan to finish the framing inside. As renovations continue, Lancaster said he’ll move the coffee counter around the site to wherever it makes sense.
Despite all the hurdles, Lancaster said he’s determined to finish the project. The coffee shop is important to him, because he sees it as a way to bring Swannanoa residents together.
“When we were opening originally before the storm, one of the main motivations for us was the people of Swannanoa needing a sense of identity and camaraderie around our town,” he said. “Swanna-nowhere has been a phrase often heard kind of throughout here.”
When one of Swannanoa’s main employers, Beacon Blanket Factory, burned down in 2003, it brought about “an exodus of people leaving Swannanoa,” Lancaster said. He has lived here for the last few years.
“This whole historic downtown part has been slowly trying to get some legs and rebuild itself,” he said. “And we were feeling the sense of pride that Swannanoa was coming to life. People were getting excited about this place. And like what a blow to get a hurricane in the middle of all of that.”
Lancaster said he’s determined to “dig in” and that he believes the downtown can bounce back.
“Our downtown could be revitalized from something like this,” he said. “Our Main Street could be a cool story of taking something, literally broken and dirty and making something beautiful out of that. And that's what I want to see. I want people to get behind that.”
