Mill town
A century ago, Buffalo City was a boomtown. Shortly after the Civil War, The Buffalo Timber Company, headquartered in New York, discovered North Carolina’s rich forestland and built the outpost on the north side of Milltail Creek. The company brought in hundreds of black and Russian laborers to build the town and lay the railroad tracks that carried out a seemingly endless supply of tim
ber. They built sawmills, of course, but they also erected a hotel, church, general store, schoolhouse, and rows of simple company homes for the laborers. Buffalo City’s first post office opened on October 11, 1889. Because the peat-rich ground was soft and muddy, residents laid down wooden poles and sawdust to form roadways. Many of the town’s buildings appeared flawed, built with imperfect timbers rejected by the mill. The three-room company homes stood together in rows above the mud — red houses for white families and white houses for blacks and immigrants. Workers left their homes each morning to drive mule carts deep into the forest to harvest cypress, juniper, and pine for a daily salary of 50 cents. Their pay often came in the form of company-produced aluminum coins, the only currency accepted at the company store. The work for such pay would have been back-breaking. The days would have been particularly long amid the yellow flies and mosquitoes that own this land in the warmer months. Winter would have brought its own bitter burdens — chilling rains and icy winds. After depleting the area’s trees, Buffalo Timber shut down in 1903, and the town almost died. Dare Lumber Company bought the property and resumed logging a few years later, and a new generation of workers and their families prospered. Buffalo City’s population grew to 3,000, making it the largest town in Dare County. By the early 1920s, however, the region’s useful timber was nearly gone, and the lumber company moved on. But this time, a new industry arose. It was moonshine whiskey — handcrafted, widely acclaimed Carolina swamp juice — that brought Buffalo City back to life. Moonshine capital
After the 18th Amendment outlawed spirits in 1920, almost every family in Buffalo City operated a still or was otherwise involved in bootleg liquor. Large shipments of sugar arrived regularly on the tugboat Hattie Creef, supplying dozens of stills scattered among nearby forests and on the banks of Milltail Creek. They made their brew with rye, not corn. A typical recipe: 400 gallons of water, 100 pounds of rye, 300 pounds of sugar, and 5 pounds of yeast. The brew flowed out of eastern North Carolina up and down the east coast, supplying speakeasies from Norfolk, Virginia, to Boston, Massachusetts. By the mid-1920s, Buffalo City was known as the moonshine capital of the United States. Federal revenuers also knew the region’s reputation, and their late-night raids shut down some stills. But production in the area continued for years, and the moonshiners often outsmarted the law. They hauled out their finished product in rows of casks tied on trotlines towed behind boats. If the feds pursued a boat, the crew cut the lines and the kegs sank — to be retrieved later. The moonshine boom was brief, however, ending soon after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Demand for homemade whiskey waned, and Buffalo City once again fell on hard times. Timber had one last gasp, but eventually the town’s population dwindled. The few remaining residents abandoned their homes when the last mill closed in the early 1950s. With no human hands to hold them in check, the swamp’s thick brush and pervasive vines soon claimed the city’s empty streets and buildings. Today, all that remains is a road to nowhere.
