Surviving the flood: the Stroupe’s story, part one

When Brenda Stroupe remembers her own experience of Haywood County’s catastrophic flood of August 2021, she thinks about the Christian lessons of 2 Corinthians.

“The Bible says you know a man by his spirit, not by his flesh,” Stroupe says, as she recalls a community that rallied to support its flood victims. From there she goes on to tell a compelling story of both spirit and flesh—a harrowing tale from Hidden Valley Circle, one of the county’s hardest-hit neighborhoods.

Brenda and her husband, Robert “Red” Stroupe, then a Canton police officer, bought their handsome two-story log home in 2013 at the lower end of a pretty, leafy neighborhood near Bethel. Red passed in 2016, and Brenda now l