BalfourWater Damage Restoration Service in Balfour, NC for Homes and BusinessesBalfour

PuroClean of South Asheville — 309 Rockwood Road, Arden, NC 28704

Balfour, NC: From Granite Quarry to Mill Village to Hendersonville’s Edge

Balfour owes its start to the railroad. William Balfour Troy, who supervised construction of the Hendersonville-to-Asheville rail line in the 1880s, opened a granite quarry here in 1892 that became one of the largest in Western North Carolina, supplying stone for the Biltmore Estate and loading three to five rail cars of granite a day at its peak. A post office and train stop followed in 1893, and by 1923 textile owner Ellison Adger Smyth, who also owned the nearby Connemara estate in Flat Rock, had built Balfour Mills on the site, a cotton mill with 10,000 spindles surrounded by a village of five- and seven-room cottages. The village grew to include a community store, a drug store, a barbershop, a swimming pool, and a baseball park still considered one of the oldest in Henderson County. Architect Erle Stillwell designed Balfour School in the 1920s to serve the mill families, and that building still stands today as the Balfour Education Center. The mill itself changed hands in 1946, becoming Berkeley Mills under Kimberly-Clark’s International Cellucotton Products Company, and merged fully into Kimberly-Clark in 1963; the site still manufactures disposable diaper products today. Balfour sits in a 1.8-square-mile pocket bordered by Mountain Home to the north, Clear Creek to the east and northeast, Rugby to the west, and the city of Hendersonville itself on every other side, with Mud Creek, a tributary of the French Broad River, forming the community’s eastern edge. US 25 Business, known locally as Asheville Highway, runs through the center of the community, connecting south into downtown Hendersonville and north about four miles to Interstate 26. That layered history leaves Balfour with a genuinely mixed building stock: century-old mill cottages, a converted 1920s schoolhouse, an active industrial plant, and newer construction filling in as the community blends into greater Hendersonville, each with its own damage risks.

Water and fire damage calls our team handles across Balfour include:

• Mud Creek overflow affecting homes and businesses along the creek’s floodplain on Balfour’s eastern edge
• Category 1 supply-line failures in the century-old cottages of the original Balfour Mills village
• Storm-driven roof leaks affecting the historic 1920s Balfour School and Education Center building
• Industrial water and equipment damage at manufacturing facilities along US 25 Business
• Water heater and washing machine overflows in homes throughout the former mill village
• Basement and crawl space flooding in newer construction along Balfour’s edge with Hendersonville
• Burst pipes during winter freeze events in older, thinly insulated mill-village homes
• Mold growth behind drywall in homes near Mud Creek after unaddressed moisture
• Grease and kitchen fires in the small commercial spaces along US 25 Business
• Flash flooding along Clear Creek tributaries bordering the community to the east

How We Reach Balfour from Our Arden Office

PuroClean of South Asheville is based at 309 Rockwood Road in Arden, and reaching Balfour is a direct run south along the same corridor that connects most of our service area. Our trucks head south on US 25 (Hendersonville Road), passing through Skyland and Royal Pines and continuing through Fletcher and the Mountain Home community before US 25 splits into US 25 Business, which becomes Asheville Highway and carries us directly into the center of Balfour. When traffic or road conditions call for it, we can shift to Interstate 26 south and pick up US 25 Business at the interchange about four miles north of the community, arriving from the same direction with a faster run on the open highway. Either route generally puts a technician in Balfour within twenty-five to thirty minutes of a call. For properties along Mud Creek on the community’s eastern edge, we continue through the center of Balfour on Asheville Highway and turn toward the creek corridor directly, which also gives us quick access to the Kimberly-Clark plant and the other manufacturing and commercial buildings that line that stretch of US 25 Business. For the older mill cottages closer to the historic Balfour School and Education Center, side streets off the highway get us to the door in a few additional minutes. Because Balfour sits right where our home base on US 25 transitions into Henderson County, dispatch can route a technician here with the same urgency as anywhere closer to Arden, which matters when Mud Creek starts to rise or a pipe fails in one of the neighborhood’s older homes.

Local Factors That Drive Water Damage, Mold, and Fire Risk in Balfour

Balfour’s biggest environmental risk factor is Mud Creek, which forms the community’s eastern boundary and has a documented history of leaving its banks. The creek has reached moderate flood stage above 18 feet during heavy rain events well before Hurricane Helene, closing roads on the Hendersonville side of the watershed even in an ordinary wet season. Helene made that risk unmistakable: Henderson County recorded close to 22 inches of rain during the storm in September 2024, and Mud Creek and its tributaries flooded homes and small businesses across the area, including many without flood insurance to cover the loss. Henderson County has seen the pattern repeat since, with heavy rain events in the years following Helene reopening the same low-lying roads and properties along Mud Creek and Clear Creek that flooded during the original storm, a reminder that saturated ground and damaged stream banks can make a community more flood-prone for years after a major event, not less. Balfour’s terrain adds to the exposure: much of the community sits in a shallow basin between the higher ground of Mountain Home and Rugby, so stormwater draining off those slopes collects in the Mud Creek corridor before it can move north into the French Broad. The area’s granite bedrock, a legacy of the same quarry that gave the community its start, sheds water quickly rather than absorbing it, adding to runoff during a sustained downpour. The building stock compounds the risk in its own way: the original mill cottages built in the 1920s carry plumbing and insulation appropriate to their era, making them more vulnerable to both freeze-related pipe bursts in winter and slow, hidden leaks that go unnoticed until mold has already taken hold. The Kimberly-Clark manufacturing site and other commercial buildings along US 25 Business bring a different set of concerns, including large roof surfaces, fire suppression systems, and materials sensitive to even brief water exposure. Together, a flood-prone creek, runoff-shedding granite soil, and a building stock spanning a full century make water damage in Balfour a matter of where a property sits and when it was built as much as anything else.