Buffalo City: Dare County's Lost Logging Town

Just off US Route Sixty-Four, inside what is now the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, a ghost town lies buried under decades of marsh and vine. Buffalo City was once the largest community in Dare County, North Carolina, with a population near three thousand in the early nineteen hundreds. The Buffalo Timber Company arrived shortly after the Civil War to harvest ancient cypress and juniper from the surrounding swamp, bringing in hundreds of workers to build a hotel, a post office, a school, a general store, and about one hundred miles of railroad track.

When Prohibition arrived in nineteen twenty the logging slowed and moonshine filled the gap, and almost every family ran a still. By the nineteen fifties the timber was gone, the market was gone, and so were the people. Today only rusty rails and a road sign remain.