The fan in Dillsboro’s Applegate Inn hangs from the ceiling like a wilted flower, its blades curving downward with a damp, downtrodden sadness that belies the conditions of the past year.

Spots of black mold grow across the sheetrock into the inn’s empty bedrooms where a faint brown line of mud about a foot high lingers, a reminder of last September’s high-water mark. Weeds grow in the driveway, and a condemnation notice is posted on the door.

In one of the inn’s outbuilding just a few feet away — a few feet further from the creek that borders the inn’s property and feeds the Tuckasegee River — three rooms sit untouched, their king-sized beds made, tile floors swept, armchairs, stone fireplaces and big screen televisions waiting for company. But there will be none.

Following last September’s floods, owner John Faulk, had his business license suspended. Occupancy is not allowed. Neither is tearing it all down and starting over, said the insurance company — at least until three weeks ago. That’s when Faulk — after receiving only $140,000 from his flood policy for a $500,000 loss — finally got permission to begin demolition.

“I want to be where I was before the floods,” Faulk said. “But where I was before the floods was open for business.”

As is often the case, it could have been worse.

“I think we were supposed to have 10 guests that night,” Faulk said. “I told my wife ‘I want you to turn these people away’.”

But recovery has been a long and arduous process marked by uncertainty and the sense of being entirely alone. Faulk was Dillsboro’s hardest hit merchant, losing three out of the four businesses he owned — the Applegate, B & Al’s Hotdog Stand and a mobile catering unit.

Faulk has gotten nothing from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, nothing from the Small Business Administration.

“The real help that I’ve gotten has been from the state of North Carolina, not the federal government,” Faulk said. “The state has been more responsive, more passionate, more cooperative and more of a partner in the process. (The feds) look at the statistics, they don’t look at the story.”

Faulk bought the Applegate Inn on somewhat of a whim. In 1995, newly married and living near Morganton, he and his wife were looking for a change from their corporate jobs when friends from Florida invited them to the mountains on a real estate shopping adventure.

“And the next thing you know we made an offer on the place,” Faulk said.

Two years later the couple had sold their house, moved to Dillsboro and taken over the inn.

Faulk gradually grew his entrepreneurial holdings, opening B & Al’s Hotdog Stand — nicknames for his grandfather, B, and grandmother, Al — on Front Street in 2001 and using the store’s commercial kitchen to cook meals for the inn, located a stone’s throw across Scott’s Creek. In June of 2004, Faulk took over the Burger Shak, a short order institution near Harold’s Supermarket near the Dillsboro/Sylva city limits.

“Just a few months after I got this, then the floods came,” Faulk said.

The night of the storm the Faulks left the inn at 8 p.m. The inn had been a sort of home a way from home, as Faulk or his wife would stay there while guests were booked, but they had a house in Sylva they’d been slowly remodeling. One long-term guest, a new teacher, remained at the inn.

At 11:30 p.m. an Applegate neighbor called to warn the Faulks of the rising waters in Scott’s Creek. The Faulks immediately went to the inn — where the water was already knee-deep — to rescue their guest.

“She was asleep, didn’t even know,” Faulk said.

Again at 5 a.m. Faulk’s phone rang, this time at the Burger Shak, where he was opening for the morning’s breakfast crowd. This time the news was a warning Faulk couldn’t do much about.

“He said, ‘I just wanted to let you know that your house is under water’,” Faulk recalled.

By the time the Faulks could get to the inn the water had receded, but the damage was already done. The walls were soaked, furnishings ruined, and the smell atrocious. Like so many others across Western North Carolina, Faulk began cleaning up, filing claims and learning the hard way that bureaucratic red tape can result in some awfully high hurdles.

Though he got the hotdog stand up and running within a couple of days, his mobile catering unit suffered water damage and mechanical problems. By the time he got it working again he had lost the help he needed to run it.

The upswing was that over the next two months, business at the Burger Shak picked up. The building next door, an old service garage, went on the market and Faulk bought it with the intent of expanding. Already the garage has been cleaned up and one of its rooms renovated to house a commercial kitchen and BBQ smoker that will serve the Shak. Plans are for the garage bays to hold a 50-seat, firehouse themed dining area.

“In the meantime, we’ve explored options to help the Applegate Inn,” Faulk said. “I have pursued every avenue I can think of for a year.”

The state helped with a low-interest debt consolidation loan.

“That bought us some time,” Faulk said. “It didn’t bring us back, but it bought us some time.”

And the town of Dillsboro has applied for a grant from the N.C. Rural Center, which if awarded, would provide financial assistance for projects including the Applegate, and a Friday (Sept. 2) conference call with Center officials seemed promising.

“I’m still trying to digest it all,” Faulk said. “I’m encouraged by it.”

Instead of simply rebuilding, Faulk hopes to do something new — a bed and breakfast that would play off Dillsboro’s Great Smoky Mountains Railroad featuring lavishly decorated, authentic train cars as rooms.

But the closing of the inn didn’t mean a stoppage of bills. The Faulks had to cancel reservations and refund deposits. And for the past eight years the Faulks had worked essentially without pay and rolled their savings into the inn’s operations.

“The only way to get paid for those eight years is to rebuild,” Faulk said.

Yet the question remains, with what?

“It’s a year and we don’t even definitively know anything,” Faulk said.