The Hospitality House

If the barn was survival, the Hospitality House was structure.

Around 1992, after the barn, we moved into a place that already carried stories long before we arrived. It wasn’t just a house—it was a system, a mission, a response to a need bigger than our family alone.

A House Built From Many Hands

Before it ever held us, homelessness in Boone had already been quietly visible. By the late 1970s, people were sleeping in the woods near downtown, lingering during business hours, existing just outside the lines of what most people noticed. The town saw it. The churches felt it.

In 1981, seven faith communities—Grace Lutheran, Boone United Methodist, First Baptist, First Presbyterian, St. Luke’s Episcopal, the Boone Jewish Community, and St. Elizabeth of the Hill Country—came together and decided that temporary help wasn’t enough. They wanted a real shelter.

Hospitality House of the Boone Area, Inc. was incorporated on September 7, 1984. Soon after, the doors at 302 W. King Street opened. The building itself dated back to 1917, purchased with a $100,000 anonymous gift secured by Constance “Connie” Humphreys.

When Connie passed away in 1986, the house took on her name in spirit—Connie’s Hospitality House. A place defined not by charity alone, but by dignity.

When It Became Home

By the time we arrived, the Hospitality House was already growing beyond its original walls. In 1989, the Rock House Annex behind the main building opened to serve families. In 1991, another property—called Sleeping Place—launched a transitional housing program.

That’s where we landed.

For the first time, there were rules, routines, and other families walking similar lines. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t permanent—but it was steadier than the barn. There was heat. There were meals. There was a sense that someone, somewhere, had thought ahead for people like us.

A Turning Point

We stayed for a couple of years. Long enough for this place to shape us, and long enough for our lives to change course again.

My mom eventually married the director of the Hospitality House. With that, our chapter there ended, and we moved out—not because we were pushed, but because life had shifted.

That detail matters. Not because it’s tidy, but because it’s complicated. This place that once caught us also became part of our family story in a way I’m still unpacking.

More Than a Shelter

Hospitality House didn’t stop evolving after we left. It expanded across counties. It built Rock Haven in 2003 for people living with disabilities. It became the point-of-entry for homeless services across seven counties under North Carolina’s Balance of State Continuum of Care.

But to me, it will always be the place after the barn.

The place where survival started to look like stability. Where my childhood intersected with a much larger story. Where I learned that help can come from strangers—and that systems, when built with intention, can change lives.

This wasn’t the end of the struggle. But it was the beginning of something different.

"Fun fact: I helped build those retaining walls, and that space used to be an edible garden to help provide food for the house.”