Appalachian Community Histories – Buffalo Creek, Wayne County: Iron Forge, Railroad Station, and a Rural High School
Along Buffalo Creek in northern Wayne County, the modern road follows a landscape that once carried the sounds of water-powered industry, railroad traffic, school bells, and families whose names became attached to the surrounding hills and branches. Near the creek’s mouth at Twelvepole Creek, the communities historically called Buffalo, Buffalo Creek, and Dunleith developed close enough together that old maps, court records, railroad documents, and newspapers sometimes seem to describe different names for parts of the same local world.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, Buffalo was firmly connected to the Norfolk and Western Railway. A federal leveling survey recorded Buffalo Station, the railroad bridge over Buffalo Creek, and a benchmark placed in the bridge abutment. A state gazetteer likewise described Buffalo Creek as a station on the Norfolk and Western Railway, seventeen miles north of Wayne. Yet the community’s history reached much farther back than the railroad.
In 1925, residents prepared a history of Buffalo Creek for West Virginia’s agricultural extension program. The account remembered pioneer families, an early gristmill, an iron forge, a brick plant, a lime kiln, private schools, churches, and the graded school that eventually became a high school. Like many community histories, it mixed valuable local memory with statements about the distant past that cannot always be independently proven. Read alongside deeds, newspapers, government surveys, court decisions, and maps, however, it opens a remarkable window into one of Wayne County’s older communities.
Before Wayne County Existed
The earliest history of Buffalo Creek must begin with an important complication. Wayne County did not yet exist when some of the community’s most significant early events supposedly occurred.
On January 18, 1842, the Virginia General Assembly created Wayne County from the western part of Cabell County. The original act described the new county’s boundaries and named it for Revolutionary War general Anthony Wayne. This means that anyone searching for Buffalo Creek residents, land transactions, tax records, or industrial activity before 1842 has to look primarily in Cabell County, Virginia records rather than Wayne County records.
That distinction becomes particularly important when considering Buffalo Creek’s earliest settlers and its iron industry. A community history written more than eighty years after Wayne County’s creation identified James McKeand as the first known settler at Buffalo Creek. It then listed the Dukes, Isaacs, Haneys, Plymales, Maloneys, Brumfields, and Staleys among the families who followed. The writer described log cabins, rough furniture, stick-and-clay chimneys, hunting, and a time when neighbors might borrow fire from one another.
Some of those family names became part of the landscape itself. Duke’s Knob, Plymale’s Branch, Walker’s Branch, Plymale’s Rocks, and Haney’s Branch preserved the memory of settlement in ordinary geographic language. In a region where formal towns were often small or nonexistent, such names could function almost like an unofficial map of family occupation.
The 1925 history should not be treated as an eyewitness account of the pioneer era. The people who prepared it were writing generations after the first settlement. Its importance lies partly in recording what Buffalo Creek residents themselves remembered about the origins of their community. Confirming exactly when McKeand and the other families arrived would require the Cabell County land books, deeds, tax records, census schedules, and court records from the early nineteenth century.
The Iron Forge at the Mouth of Buffalo Creek
The most intriguing chapter in Buffalo Creek’s history may be the iron forge said to have operated near the mouth of the creek.
A December 11, 1919 article in the Wayne County News reported that George Coons, Jacob Coons, and Stephen Wilson constructed an iron forge at the mouth of Buffalo Creek in 1828. The newspaper called it the first iron forge built in that part of West Virginia and described a building measuring approximately seventy by forty feet, made of slab boards and containing two tilt hammers weighing about seven hundred pounds each. It went so far as to describe the forge as the county’s first factory.
The date is significant. An 1828 forge would place industrial activity at Buffalo Creek fourteen years before Wayne County was created and thirty-five years before West Virginia became a state.
Stephen Wilson was not simply inserted into the story decades later without any connection to the region. The same 1919 account included Wilson among the early settlers of Ceredo District, along with Anthony Plymale and William Haney, names that also appear repeatedly in Buffalo Creek history.
Six years later, the 1925 Buffalo Creek history preserved an even larger memory of the forge. According to that account, Buffalo Creek had once grown considerably because of an iron operation located within roughly three hundred yards of what later became Buffalo Creek station. The writer remembered the sound of a massive hammer carrying for miles on still mornings.
There is a discrepancy between the two sources. The 1919 newspaper described two seven-hundred-pound tilt hammers, while the 1925 community history referred to an eighteen-hundred-pound hammer. It is possible that the machinery changed during the forge’s lifetime, but the surviving sources do not prove that. The difference is a reminder that both accounts were written many decades after 1828.
What remains especially important is the consistency of the larger story. Two early twentieth-century Wayne County sources independently placed a substantial iron forge at Buffalo Creek and connected it to the area’s early development.
The next step in firmly establishing the story would be finding George Coons, Jacob Coons, or Stephen Wilson in Cabell County deeds, land books, tax lists, court orders, or business records from the late 1820s and 1830s. Until such records are located, 1828 should be presented as a well-established local historical tradition supported by early county histories, but not yet as a date proven by a surviving 1828 business record.
Mills, Bricks, Lime, and an Early Rural Economy
The forge was not the only industry remembered at Buffalo Creek.
The 1925 community history claimed that the first mill in the county for grinding corn and wheat stood at the mouth of Buffalo Creek and was operated by Bill Turner. It also recalled an early brick plant and lime kiln. Although the short account does not provide operating dates, owners, or production figures for the latter industries, it suggests that Buffalo Creek developed as something more complicated than a scattered agricultural settlement.
Its location helps explain why. Buffalo Creek empties into Twelvepole Creek in northern Wayne County, placing the community within reach of Ceredo, Kenova, the Ohio River, and eventually major railroad connections. Water, narrow bottomland, nearby timber, roads through the hills, and later rail transportation gave the area advantages that were absent from many isolated hollows.
The 1925 authors even claimed that Buffalo Creek had once been the largest town in the Tri-State section because of the forge. That sweeping statement is difficult to verify and should be understood as community memory rather than a demonstrated population statistic. What can be documented is that the forge became important enough to occupy a central place in local recollections nearly a century later.
Buffalo Creek Meets the Railroad
By the turn of the twentieth century, Buffalo Creek had entered a different industrial age.
In 1901, a United States Geological Survey leveling party traveled southeast from Ceredo along the Norfolk and Western Railway toward Shoals. At Buffalo it recorded a station, the elevation of the railway, and a federal benchmark positioned in the southwest abutment of the railroad bridge over Buffalo Creek. The entry is short, but it establishes Buffalo as a recognized stop on the Norfolk and Western system by the opening years of the twentieth century.
A later geological report reproduced the same railroad survey information, recording Buffalo Station and the bridge over Buffalo Creek. Contemporary business-directory material went further by identifying Buffalo Creek specifically as a Norfolk and Western station in Wayne County.
Railroad records may preserve considerably more of the story. The Norfolk and Western Railway and Associated Companies Collection at Virginia Tech includes a file specifically described as Buffalo Creek, West Virginia deeds from 1903 to 1917. Those deeds could eventually reveal land purchases, rights of way, station property, bridge property, or other railroad interests around the community.
The railroad gave Buffalo Creek something earlier generations had never possessed: a direct physical connection to a much larger commercial network. People, mail, manufactured goods, agricultural products, building materials, and industrial freight could move through the valley with far greater speed than had been possible in the wagon-road era.
A 1911 map of Wayne County shows both Buffalo Creek and Dunleith P.O. in this northern section of the county, reinforcing how closely the two names were associated with the same transportation landscape.
Buffalo Creek, Dunleith, and the Roads Through the Hills
The relationship between Buffalo Creek and Dunleith becomes even clearer in an unlikely source: a West Virginia Supreme Court case.
In Haws v. County Court of Wayne County, decided in 1920, the court considered a dispute over the proper use of road-bond money. In explaining the geography, the court described one road from Kenova running through Happy Hollow, along Sweet Run and Dock’s Creek, crossing into the Buffalo Creek watershed, and following Buffalo Creek down toward Twelvepole Creek at Dunleith.
The opinion is remarkably useful because it preserves the transportation geography of the community at the moment automobiles and improved public roads were beginning to transform rural Wayne County.
The road-bond order also separately provided money for a road beginning at Dunleith and extending up Buffalo Creek. The court relied partly on that fact when rejecting an interpretation that would have duplicated road construction along the creek.
For local history, the legal dispute matters less than the geography embedded inside it. Buffalo Creek was part of a recognized route connecting interior roads with Twelvepole Creek, Ceredo, and Kenova. It was not merely a stream around which houses happened to cluster.
The names themselves could be confusing. West Virginia’s archival place-name index lists Buffalo Creek in Wayne County from 1911 to 1967 and also associates the record with Dunleith in 1935. Rather than assuming that one name simply replaced the other at a single moment, the surviving evidence suggests overlapping uses involving the creek, railroad station, postal designation, and settlement at the mouth of the waterway.
Road improvement continued during the Depression. A 1935 Wayne County News account of public road projects described work from Buffalo Creek southwest of Dunleith toward the Big Sandy River and another project beginning on Buffalo Creek and following local state routes. By then, the automobile road system was becoming as important to the community as the railroad had been a generation before.
The Buffalo Mound
Buffalo Creek’s written history also contains evidence of an older human presence, although the surviving accounts have to be handled carefully.
The 1925 community history reported that flint projectile points had been found throughout the hills and valleys and that mounds or graves were known in the vicinity. From this, local residents believed that a sizeable Indigenous settlement had once existed near Buffalo Creek.
Two years earlier, the Wayne County News had discussed what it called the Buffalo Mound. The article placed the mound near Buffalo Creek High School and reported that W. L. Utterback, formerly associated with the biology department at Marshall College, had studied and mapped the formation. It also credited newspaperman J. Roy Fuller with previously introducing the site to local readers.
The 1923 writer admitted that no one knew precisely who had constructed the mound or why. That uncertainty is important. Early twentieth-century descriptions of Indigenous earthworks often reflected outdated archaeological assumptions, and neither the newspaper nor the community history can substitute for a modern professional archaeological investigation.
Still, the sources demonstrate that the Buffalo Creek mound was a recognized local landmark by the 1920s and had attracted academic attention from Marshall College. Finding Utterback’s original field notes, map, correspondence, or Fuller article could significantly improve what is known about the site.
A School Built After a Local Fight
If the forge represented Buffalo Creek’s nineteenth-century identity and the railroad its connection to the industrial world, the school became one of the defining institutions of the twentieth-century community.
The 1925 history stated that a four-room graded school was erected in 1908 and that high-school instruction began there in 1915. Later research preserved through the Clio public-history project adds that the Ceredo Independent School District purchased approximately four acres from William Edward Plymale in 1908 and constructed the Central Graded School there. The building became much more than a place for children to attend classes. It also functioned as a community gathering place.
Secondary education came to Buffalo in 1915. Taylor Bascom McClure was associated with establishing the high-school program, and the first class reportedly enrolled approximately thirty students. For families living through central and northern Wayne County, this created an alternative to traveling farther away for secondary education.
By January 1920, the Wayne County News called Ceredo District High School at Buffalo the first rural high school established in Wayne County. The paper explained that the building had been constructed only after what it described as a difficult local fight. It named several early educators, including T. B. McClure, J. Floyd Harrison, Bertha Plymale, L. E. Cox, J. F. Hussell, G. W. Hypes, and Pansey Staley.
The campus was already expanding beyond the traditional classroom. The newspaper described a barn for students who rode to school, together with baseball and basketball facilities, a tennis court, a garden, and an active Parent Teacher Association. The details reveal how a rural high school functioned as an institution around which a much broader community life could develop.
Buffalo High School Grows
Only two years later, Buffalo’s school was attracting still greater attention.
The Wayne County News reported in May 1922 that thirteen students were graduating from Buffalo District High School. New equipment had been purchased, a gymnasium had been constructed, and the district was working toward making the school a fully ranked high school where students could complete four years of secondary education. The commencement speaker was scheduled to be West Virginia Supreme Court judge Harold Ritz.
The newspaper described Buffalo as one of the most progressive rural educational institutions in the state. Such praise certainly carried a measure of local pride, but it also reflected the speed with which education was changing in the community. A generation earlier, many rural children received only elementary instruction in small neighborhood schools. By the 1920s, Buffalo residents were supporting laboratories, athletics, expanded courses, commencement ceremonies, and an increasingly professional faculty.
Growing enrollment eventually required more space. A new brick school was constructed across from the earlier building in 1929. Clio’s history places the cost at approximately $65,000 and describes ten classrooms, a library, and a cafeteria. In 1933, after Wayne County reorganized its school administration, Ceredo District High School became Buffalo High School.
Generations of students would pass through the building. The West Virginia State Archives preserves Buffalo High School yearbooks from multiple years, including the 1946 Memoriae and later editions of The Bison. These volumes preserve photographs, teachers, students, clubs, athletics, advertisements, and everyday pieces of community life that formal government records rarely capture.
Buffalo High eventually became known far beyond the creek valley through athletics as well. In 1992, the school won the West Virginia Class AA football championship. Six years later, however, the independent high-school era ended. Buffalo, Vinson, and Ceredo-Kenova high schools were consolidated into Spring Valley High School in 1998.
The old Buffalo High School building remained standing for another two decades before being demolished in 2019 after officials determined that its condition had become a safety concern. The gymnasium and cafeteria were retained, and residents reportedly collected bricks from the demolished structure as reminders of a school that had served the community for generations.
A Community Remembering Itself
One of the most revealing things about the 1925 Buffalo Creek history is not simply what it says happened, but what residents believed was worth remembering.
They remembered pioneer cabins and families. They remembered a corn and wheat mill. They remembered an iron forge whose hammer supposedly echoed through the valley. They remembered brick and lime production, churches, teachers, public officials, and the transformation of a four-room graded school into a high school.
They also took pride in the people who had left Buffalo Creek and entered professions beyond the community. The history named ministers, attorneys, engineers, professors, merchants, legislators, teachers, and county officials. Members of the Plymale and Brumfield families appeared prominently in that civic memory.
Some of the details may eventually change as more primary records are uncovered. The reported scale of the forge needs additional documentary support. The exact chronology of the earliest settlers can be strengthened through Cabell County records. The Buffalo Mound deserves modern archaeological investigation. Railroad deeds could reveal property relationships that have never been incorporated into local histories.
Yet those unanswered questions do not weaken Buffalo Creek’s story. They make it richer.
Why Buffalo Creek Matters
Buffalo Creek is the kind of Appalachian community that can disappear in a history written only around incorporated towns and county seats.
It never needed a grand courthouse square to matter.
Its history unfolded along a creek and a railroad line, in family branches named for the people who settled them, beside an iron forge remembered nearly a century after its fires went cold, and inside a rural school that became one of Wayne County’s most important educational institutions.
The 1828 forge story places Buffalo Creek surprisingly early in the industrial history of the region, even if more Cabell County documentation is still needed. The arrival of the Norfolk and Western brought the community into a national transportation network. Road improvements connected it more closely to Kenova, Ceredo, Twelvepole Creek, and the Big Sandy region. The school gave generations of children an educational center close to home.
Buffalo Creek therefore tells a larger Appalachian story.
It is the story of places that existed before county boundaries did, of industries that rose and vanished before photographs could easily preserve them, of railroads that changed rural geography, and of schools that became the center of community identity.
Today the forge is gone, Buffalo Station no longer defines daily life, and Buffalo High School has disappeared from the landscape. Yet the creek still carries the old name through Wayne County, and the names of families, roads, branches, maps, yearbooks, newspapers, and government records continue to preserve pieces of the community that grew around it.
Buffalo Creek did not vanish.
It left its history everywhere.
Sources & Further Reading
“History of Buffalo Creek Community.” Prepared 1925. West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/agrext/bufcreek.html
“Squibs From Early History of Districts in This County.” Wayne County News, December 11, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191211.html
Virginia General Assembly. “An Act Establishing the County of Wayne of Part of the County of Cabell.” Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia, 1841–42, chap. 60, 36–38. Passed January 18, 1842. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/counties/wayne01.html
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Cabell County Land Records, 1806–1867. A&M 2136. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/5993
Gannett, Samuel Stinson, and David Henry Baldwin. Results of Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1896 to 1908, Inclusive. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 399. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b399
Haws v. County Court of Wayne County, 86 W. Va. 650, 104 S.E. 119. Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, September 21, 1920. https://openjurist.org/86/wva/650/haws-v-county-court-of-wayne-county
“County’s First Rural High School.” Wayne County News, January 22, 1920. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn200122.html
“Buffalo Graduation.” Wayne County News, May 18, 1922. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society transcription. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201922.htm
Harrison, J. Floyd. “Wayne’s Seven Wonders.” Wayne County News, December 23, 1923. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn231223.html
West Virginia State Archives. “West Virginia Yearbooks.” Buffalo High School, Kenova, Wayne County, holdings including Memoriae and The Bison. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/yearbooks.html
Paynter, Sidney. “Buffalo High School (1915–1998).” Clio. Created October 15, 2019. Last updated November 24, 2019. https://theclio.com/entry/86627
Norfolk & Western Railway and Associated Companies Collection. “Buffalo Creek (West Virginia) Deeds, 1903–1917.” Box 3, Folder 4. Ms.2009.037. Special Collections and University Archives, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA. https://arvasarchive.org/catalog/viblbv_repositories_2_resources_2456_c12_c02
West Virginia State Road Commission. County Highway Maps for West Virginia. 1937. A&M 4479. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/6604
West Virginia Postmasters. West Virginia Postmasters Appointment Records, 1857–1971. A&M 3026. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1217
Krebs, Charles E., and D. D. Teets Jr. County Reports and Maps: Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln Counties. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1913. https://books.google.com/books?id=ePNLAAAAMAAJ
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia: Buffalo Creek.” West Virginia State Archives. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamb.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “1790–1890 Federal Population Census: Microfilm Catalog.” Washington, DC: National Archives. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/microfilm-catalog
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Lawrence A. Lang Collection, West Virginia Land Records. A&M 3833. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2284
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Frederick B. Lambert Papers. A&M 1244. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/subjects/724
West Virginia University Herbarium. “Clematis viorna, Buffalo Creek, Wayne County, West Virginia, June 24, 1937.” Lewis Plymale Collection. West Virginia University Research Repository. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/ranunculaceae/2004/
Author Note: Buffalo Creek is one of those Appalachian communities whose importance becomes much clearer when local histories are placed beside newspapers, court decisions, railroad records, maps, and early land records. Some questions, particularly the full story of the reported 1828 iron forge, remain open for further research in the surviving Cabell County records.