A Journey Through North Carolina's Ghost Towns | Exploring Creation Vids

just when i think i know north carolina well another town or city pops up at least the memory of a town or city across our landscape there are a number of forgotten towns of a few hundred or even a few thousand people that are no longer inhabited and that's our story today on exploring north carolina tar heel ghost towns here in the 21st century as you cross north carolina's vast 500 mile landscape from west to east there are a number of towns and cities that exist only in memory and imagination they are tar heel ghost towns if you've visited wilmington or the beaches south of wilmington you've probably passed one of north carolina's most important colonial towns a town that is no more but it's one of north carolina's most important archaeological sites brunswick town [Music] i met jim mckee site manager at brunswick town state historic site several miles down the cape fear river from wilmington i asked jim to tell us about the most important seaport in north carolina or the east coast which no longer exist during the 18th century from the time brunswick is established in 1726 some estimates say as much as 70 of the world's naval stores shipped out of north carolina with the lion's share coming out of brunswick looking at the port records specifically in the 1760s and 1770s there is more pine tar alone shipped out of brunswick then the other 44 ports in north america and the west indies combined there were several reasons why the town was located right here so this was pretty much the last good area on the river where you had deep water a secure anchorage you had high bluffs it was also considered far enough upriver to protect it from pirates it was far enough they figured inland to kind of keep it safe from hurricanes and there was a fresh water source here so all those reasons put together allowed them to put the town right here as far as the natural resources go lord 90 million square acres of longleaf pine from north carolina down into upper south carolina georgia all those longleaf pines made the naval stores brunswick town was not only an export center and an economic engine for the north carolina colony it was also important politically brunswick started out as the political and maritime center for the lower cape fear i hate to say this but that upstart little community upstream that would eventually settle on the name of wilmington assert brunswick in political power the the first county seat of new hanover county was here at brunswick and around 1741 42 the county seat was moved from here to wilmington now you're saying but the governor lived here or later on would live here wouldn't that make it the political center the local government being the the county seat really put the politics in wilmington so as a political center it brunswick kind of waned until 1764 when brunswick county separated from new hanover and the new county seat for brunswick county was put here in terms of it being an economic center oh it was that because this really was the first international port in terms of deep water in terms of the the international shipping brunswick is the center and as a mercantile center if you look at the imports there's not a lot of goods coming in in mass here there's they're still coming into all the different ports but as an export center brunswick town was home to some prominent early north carolinians and jim mckee has a clear favorite yet dobbs dobbs was so accomplished he was an architect he was an engineer he did cartography he did astronomy biology entomology his studies on honeybees in north carolina was some of the first written accounts of of bee studies yeah arthur dobbs when as as a governor he is probably no offense to any of our governors since him but dobbs i would consider probably the most accomplished governor that we've had one of the things he was you if you asked him he was most proud of was the fly trap sensitive now was he the first one to discover it probably not but he's the first one to truly document it and unfortunately for dobbs he had trouble getting samples sent to england and to other naturalists but it's still when when the samples were were getting to philadelphia and across the the ocean to europe it just it amazed everybody that there would be this plant that actually ate meat since brunswick town was an economic colossus inhabited by smart people and was in a strategic location on the north carolina coast why isn't it one of north carolina's largest and most prosperous cities today jim mckee gave us a brief history of its demise it was attacked and captured by spanish privateers during king george's war in september of 1748 it was the site of one of the first if not the first armed successful armed rebellions against british authority in america during the stamp act crisis in february of 1766 and it was burned twice by the british in 1776 brunswick town would never regain its preeminent position as a port and political center it was however used by confederate forces as the site of fort anderson during the american civil war remnants of fort anderson can still be seen for visitors today however perhaps the most astonishing remnants of brunswick town are the many stone foundations of homes and businesses built before 1776. the stones used in these foundations are ballast stones which came from numerous ships from far away ports you can't miss the most prominent structure in brunswick town the magnificent saint phillips anglican church with four foot thick walls in its day it was the most formidable structure in the colony when you visit brunswick town you can still see longleaf pine forest osprey and eagles and some prodigious alligators in nearby creeks and don't forget to look for arthur daub's favorite plant the venus flytrap almost 500 miles to the northwest of brunswick town in a remote valley near the tennessee border you'll come to our second ghost town cataloochee during its heyday at the turn of the 20th century catalucci was home to 1200 hardy mountain residents we had the privilege of visiting with wayne caldwell whose family settled in the cataloochee valley wayne has also written extensively about cataloochee its history and its legacy i ask wayne to describe the location topography and rivers of the cataloochee region well the the striking thing about catalucci to me is the isolation it's just hard to get to they don't have any rivers there they're just creeks uh there's basically three watersheds that come together at cataloochee creek i've heard it called the back of beyond i've heard a lot of other places in north carolina call that but that just sort of emphasizes the isolation of the place you have to be intent on getting there even today and i think that's what the original european settlers liked about it they could go in there and they weren't going to be bothered by government or anything else really wayne told us about the settlement of this magnificent valley first by native americans and then by european settlers in the 1830s the cherokees had established towns on little tennessee river and places like that but they never established a town in cataloochee there's plenty of archaeological evidence that they were there i think they used catalucci more or less as a either a refuge or a place to find game there were basically four five or six families that came in in the 1830s european saddlers there were the calwells there were the woodies the hannahs the hoaglands the bennetts and the palmers but certainly they were coming in by the mid-1830s and they settled by the creek and this the little town that became we call it catalucci i guess these days but they called it nelly uh in the uh 1930s simply because the postmasters daughter's name was nellie and they had a general store post office that kind of thing it was very close to where the palmer chapel church is today by 1900 historians say there were over hundred people in the valley wayne caldwell described life in cataloochee in the early 20th century well people did a little bit of everything in cataloochee there was cobblers there were people who made you know clothing shoes they spun flax you know there were people who kept store post office that kind of thing but i i can talk about some of the some of the call whales up there my cousin raymond was born there his daddy ran a grist mill of palmer creek he also farmed about 50 acres he had a blacksmith shop and there was never an organized timber industry in cataloochee i think because of the territory they couldn't get those narrow gauge trains to work down and through there farming was what most people did they grew a lot of apples they grew a lot of corn and obviously what you did with your corn was either feed it to your cattle or make it into liquor or can it and you know put it up and that kind of thing it was a community that was pretty much self-sufficient this is the story of ghost towns which means there was an end to the town of cataloochee and its residents cataluci is now located within the boundaries of the great smoky mountains national park i asked wayne caldwell about the reaction of residents to the park at the time when they were asked to leave their way of life the 1910 census showed i think it was 1251 people in cataloochee which was pretty much capacity in the valley you go in there today and you see three or four houses in the church in the school and you think well this is very quaint but then you think about where in the world did 1250 people live in this valley but the way of life really in 1910 20 around in there was rapidly changing you can make it on 50 acres you can't make it on 25. and the people were used to having seven and eight kids and mama and pop die and leave the leave the land to the kids and all of a sudden here's a kid with a four acre piece what's it going to do with that the north carolina park commission started taking land in 1928 and by that time the population of the valley was almost in half it was about 600 when the park came they said well we'll pay you money for your land and you can leave or we can pay you probably a different amount of money and you can stay with the life lease renewable every year and probably about 90 or 95 percent of the people took the settlement and left i think part of the reason for that was the economic times somebody in 1930 1933 is waving money in your face and saying you know if you take this and maybe it wasn't a fair settlement maybe you didn't think it was but it was actually money i think it was the correct decision given the time that's gone by i know some people who are still bitter about the decision it killed mama and daddy i have heard stories of farmers who left and who could not they just really couldn't sleep anymore they had to get back and they had to hear that creek i go to cataloochee and i see a lot of nature and i see a lot of topography that you that would have been destroyed otherwise one one of the reasons that i wrote my novels about catalucci was that i realized there was a human cost to the park but i think on balance it was the right decision the story of cataluci is the story of change change from an isolated mountain community to permanent preservation as part of a national park today you can still hear the murmur of the creeks see the same salamanders and see families of turkey [Music] and puddle parties of butterfly imagine yourself living in the cataloochee valley in the 1800s today one other change has occurred in the valley the repopulation of american elk which once roamed carolina highlands the catalucci valley is now an epicenter for elk in the smoky mountains [Music] if i gave you the name buffalo city you'd probably think of wyoming or montana but think dare county north carolina for one of this state's most interesting ghost towns i asked my friend and historian of eastern north carolina bland simpson to tell us about the origin of buffalo city and the makeup of its population buffalo city owes its name to the buffalo city lumber company the first of three serious lumber companies that were operating here and the town name comes from the operators the owners were from buffalo new york that's the story and buffalo city lumber company set up shop out here in the 1880s and operated for a couple of decades or so and then the dare lumber company was the successor and after the dare lumber company shut down about the mid-1920s the duvall brothers had a mill here and so the lumbering timbering out here went on pretty much from the 1880s on up through the late 1920s well we might should have called it buffalo town or buffalo village instead of buffalo city but the latter was the name it was a real it wasn't just a lumber camp or timber camp it was a city with men women children the numbers i've heard that sound most reliable to me come from jesse bassnight who was born here in 1921 he said there were about 300 people during the 1920s but that there were more considerably more in the 19 teens uh around 900 was his estimate including a couple of hundred who were russians who must have been imported this was during the dare a lumber company heyday they must have been imported by the that firm and they stayed here last night said for about a year and made enough money to go home and be considered rich back in russia when you travel through dare terrell and hyde counties it's almost impossible to imagine a town of any size on this wet spongy land bland simpson explains how it was done what kind of town was buffalo city well it was a town situated in what william farden would call the abject mud it was right down in the spongy earth and the way they set it up to literally set it up was to create a grid you know say on a home lot house lot a grid of small trees and then pour they had plenty of sawdust pour sawdust all over it and then do that again and build up the uh the earth such as there was here i mean this is swamp territory uh to build it up in that way and then put structures on top of it uh there were a lot of houses there were this was a segregated time in the south the they had white houses for black people they had red houses for the white people they had a they had streets that were as often as not semi submerged they had a railroad train and these there were three engines and the train tracks came right through the middle of buffalo city curved and went down right down by the water and there was a huge wharf system there with a kind of a high boy looking operation that would had a derrick on it and would pull the logs off the flat cars and then a steam tug would pull those barges down buffalo down mill tail creek out to alligator river five miles from this from buffalo city even in the wilds of dare county there were some accoutrements of big city life buffalo city as a company town whether it was only one industry and at one operation at a time historically and the deer lumber company for instance paid uh 250 a day and it paid uh aluminum coins which could only be spent in one place the dare forest store and so people got their their coins went to the store and they sold everything uh canned goods uh hurricane lanterns that tools that sort of thing and the aluminum coins were called they weren't called money they were called pluck and they had printed the dare forest store on the coins with the phrase good trade they all had a hole in the middle so company store there was a hotel we know of at least one hotel i think at a time it was called the buffalo city hotel and came to be called the red onion hotel and at least one great courtship occurred there ben bassnight who was a boatman and a boat builder said he courted his future wife here ella ambrose and said he he thought that uh most of their courting had been at the red onion dances at the red onion hotel said i got my eyes on a young girl in a blue surge sailor suit she said when she was dancing she would brush her hand across her dress and when she would jib that dress would snap like a jib sheet all towns and cities have several lives and buffalo city was no different after the timber played out in the mid late 20s here were a bunch of hard-working people who didn't mind going to work and were familiar with boilers and industrial machinery and so forth so they just moved over from the timber trade to the illicit liquor making trade and there was more than one operation back here in fact one was so large uh i think closer up to east lake which is just a few miles to the north of buffalo city one was so large that folks went to work by a mill whistle they work ships and the whiskey from the dair mainland here was going to up across the sound elizabeth city and on up to hampton roads and chesapeake bay and some of it was coming up toward the what we now call the triangle raleigh durham chapel hill even though you can't visit the company store or the red onion hotel buffalo city is still with us in memory just a couple of miles or so going east toward nags head toward mateo and nags head once you cross the bridge you're going to see a road that says buffalo city two miles and it's well worth the few minutes it takes to get down here to buffalo city the landing at for milltale creek and uh and take a look and think about the hundreds of people who lived here at one point the towns that are no longer here why were they here whatever the place to begin with what made people want to go and be there and and how did they do it and how hard was it because some of these places like buffalo city way out here in the swamps or diamond city out there on shackleford banks that is no more these are not easy places to live in and by coming to some terms with an understanding of how our forebears lived we start to understand how we got here and what we are heirs to you

Channel: Exploring Creation Vids

Views: 79,998

Keywords: Exploring The Forgotten, A Journey Through North Carolina's Ghost Towns, Exploring Creation Vids, North Carolina History, Abandoned Towns Tour, Ghost Towns Revealed, Lost Cities Explored, Tar Heel Mysteries, Hidden Towns Uncovered, Deserted Towns Adventure, Historical Towns NC, North Carolina Exploration, Secret Towns Documentary, Abandoned Places NC, Ghost Towns History, North Carolina Heritage, Old Town Mysteries, Exploring Lost Towns, North Carolina Ghost Towns, ECV&x%, NC

Id: dCdwxW8S3aw

Length: 24min 33sec (1473 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 31 2022