Appalachian Community Histories – Shoals, Wayne County: Buffalo Shoals, Mills, Schools, and the Railroad Along Twelvepole Creek
Along Twelvepole Creek in Wayne County sits a community whose surviving records reach much farther into the nineteenth century than the modern name might suggest. Shoals appears today as a small unincorporated place in Union District, but older newspapers, postal records, school histories, federal surveys, business directories, and photographs reveal a settlement that once possessed mills, stores, physicians, a blacksmith, a post office, a school, daily mail service, and eventually a station on the Norfolk & Western Railway.
For much of the nineteenth century, the community was known as Buffalo Shoals. That older name is essential to understanding its history. West Virginia Archives and History records Buffalo Shoals in Wayne County in nineteenth and early twentieth-century place-name sources, while Shoals appears separately by 1891. The archive eventually cross-referenced Buffalo Shoals to Shoals, preserving evidence of a gradual change in local identity rather than the sudden creation of a new settlement.
The research trail is unusually strong for a community of this size. A federal postal directory confirms Buffalo Shoals as an official post office by 1866. A Wayne County school history carried local memory of a school building there in 1823. An elderly resident remembered attending school at Buffalo Shoals in 1858. An 1885 newspaper correspondent described its stores, mill, doctors, schoolhouse, blacksmith, crops, and daily mail. Federal surveyors later recorded Shoals as both a post village and railroad station. A 1906 postcard preserved by Marshall University even shows Twelvepole Creek at Shoals near the site where Henry Luther’s mill had been washed away. Those sources form the core of the attached research assembled for this community. Pasted markdown
Before Shoals Was Shoals
The name Buffalo Shoals belongs to an older Wayne County landscape.
When the earliest school traditionally associated with Buffalo Shoals was built, Wayne County itself did not yet exist. The area remained part of Cabell County until the Virginia General Assembly created Wayne County in 1842. Families along Twelvepole Creek lived in a world of scattered farms, rough roads, creek crossings, timber, small mills, and household agriculture long before railroads or improved highways tied the valley closely to Huntington and the Ohio River.
A 1919 history of Wayne County education published in the Wayne County News claimed that Buffalo Shoals possessed the first school building in what later became Union District. According to that account, Thomas Napier had already taught on Beech Fork in 1818, but Buffalo Shoals erected a building specifically for school purposes in 1823, with Napier again serving as teacher.
The article was written nearly a century after the supposed construction of that first school, so the 1823 date deserves some caution. No surviving building record has yet been located to prove the claim independently. Still, the story is important because it shows how early twentieth-century Wayne County residents remembered Buffalo Shoals. They did not regard it as a settlement created by the railroad. In local memory, it was already an established community during the earliest period of formal schooling in the county.
The schools of that era would have looked little like the graded schools of the twentieth century. The same 1919 article described early buildings constructed from logs, with primitive furnishings and short terms supported by local families. Education existed because neighbors organized it, built a structure, found a teacher, and gathered enough pupils to make a term possible.
School at Buffalo Shoals in 1858
Another source brings the school story much closer to the people who actually experienced it.
In 1923, seventy-four-year-old Bostic Brumfield Sr. spoke with the Wayne County News about his childhood. He remembered attending school at Buffalo Shoals in 1858 under a teacher named America Showater. According to Brumfield, about forty pupils attended the school, and the teacher still had the responsibility of making goose-quill pens for the children to use in their lessons.
Brumfield had preserved a small book that Showater gave him on his birthday that same year. More than six decades later, he could still name several of the children who had shared the schoolroom with him.
His recollection gives Buffalo Shoals something that maps and government reports rarely provide. It gives the community a classroom.
Before the railroad, before the business directory, and before federal mapmakers began labeling Shoals, children were already gathering there for lessons. They wrote with handmade pens, studied under a local teacher, and walked home into a countryside that still contained deer, wild hogs, extensive forests, and relatively little of the infrastructure that later generations would take for granted.
Buffalo Shoals Becomes a Postal Community
The post office offers some of the strongest documentary evidence for Buffalo Shoals as a recognized nineteenth-century community.
An official United States Post Office Department directory published in 1866 listed Buffalo Shoals in Wayne County, West Virginia, with Hiram Luther as postmaster. That places the name firmly within federal records only a few years after West Virginia became a state.
The post office mattered far beyond the handling of letters. In a rural Appalachian community, a post office helped define place. Residents could give Buffalo Shoals as an address, newspapers could reach subscribers there, government correspondence could find pensioners and property owners, and merchants could maintain ties with communities beyond Twelvepole Creek.
By the 1880s, Buffalo Shoals had become a recognizable stop for anyone traveling the valley.
A Newspaper Visits Buffalo Shoals
One of the finest surviving descriptions appeared in the Ceredo Advance on October 22, 1885.
A newspaper representative traveling up Twelvepole Creek stopped at Buffalo Shoals and met Jeff Fuller, J. M. Fuller, and Dr. Grant. The journey continued farther up the valley, but on the return trip the traveler stopped again at the Shoals post office, where Fuller and Grant were engaged in a long series of checker games.
That seemingly insignificant detail provides one of the most human glimpses of Buffalo Shoals.
The post office was not simply a counter where letters changed hands. It was a social place. Residents met neighbors, heard news, talked politics, encountered travelers, and apparently spent enough time together to settle an extended checker rivalry while a newspaper man watched.
The same issue carried community correspondence under the heading “Buffalo Sholes,” using another spelling variation common in nineteenth-century records. The correspondent described crops of corn, potatoes, and especially sorghum. So much sorghum had been produced that people were searching for barrels to hold the syrup.
Agriculture was only part of the picture.
A. Tharp had completed a new dam for his mill and was installing a sash saw. Buffalo Shoals had daily mail, two stores, a blacksmith shop, a combined saw and flouring mill, a new schoolhouse, and two doctors. The writer finished the description with a little nineteenth-century humor by noting that the community also had “plenty of loafers.”
For a place that can look small on a modern map, the 1885 description is remarkable.
Buffalo Shoals had the basic institutions required to serve a much wider rural population. Farmers needed grain ground. Timber could be sawn into lumber. Horses and tools required blacksmith work. Stores supplied manufactured goods that farms could not produce. Physicians served families scattered across the valleys and branches. The post office connected residents with the outside world, while the school connected one generation to the next.
Buffalo Shoals was not a city, but it did not need to be. It functioned as a rural service center.
Waterpower and the Mills of Shoals
The mills were among the most important pieces of that local economy.
Twelvepole Creek gave settlers a source of waterpower long before electricity reached rural Wayne County. Where the geography permitted a dam and millrace, flowing water could operate machinery for grinding grain or sawing timber.
The 1885 newspaper account shows A. Tharp actively improving the Buffalo Shoals mill system. His new dam and sash saw joined flouring operations already important enough to be mentioned among the community’s principal features.
Later records suggest that milling remained closely connected with Shoals. The 1904 to 1905 West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory listed Hence Jones as operating a grist mill in the community.
A grist mill could influence daily life far beyond its physical size. Farm families might raise corn in surrounding hollows, but the grain still needed to be turned into meal. A trip to the mill became both an economic necessity and a social occasion, bringing people from scattered farms into the same place.
Modern historical planning work along the old Wayne Branch still identifies Shoals as a place where early settlers constructed both a dam and a grist mill, showing how deeply waterpower became associated with the community’s landscape.
Yet Twelvepole Creek could destroy what it powered.
Henry Luther’s Mill and a Photograph of Old Shoals
Marshall University preserves perhaps the most evocative surviving image connected with the community.
The black-and-white postcard is titled Twelvepole Creek, Shoals, Wayne County, W.Va. 1906. It was postmarked at Shoals on May 24, 1906, and sent to Mrs. Annie Copley of Shoals. An older caption preserved with the postcard states that the image showed Twelvepole Creek around 1900, shortly after a mill built by Henry Luther had washed away.
That photograph links several parts of Shoals history together.
The Luther name already appears in the community’s postal history, with Hiram Luther serving as Buffalo Shoals postmaster in 1866. Decades later, the business directory identified James Luther as the Shoals postmaster and blacksmith. Henry Luther’s connection with a mill adds another member of the family to the community’s documented economic life.
More importantly, the postcard preserves the relationship between the settlement and Twelvepole Creek itself.
The water that made a mill possible could also wash it away. Flooding was not simply an occasional disaster imposed upon the valley. It was one of the permanent risks of building homes, roads, mills, bridges, railroad tracks, and businesses beside a mountain stream.
The photograph turns that reality into something visible. Shoals was a community shaped by water in nearly every sense.
From Buffalo Shoals to Shoals
During the closing years of the nineteenth century, the shorter name Shoals became increasingly common.
West Virginia Archives and History records Shoals in Wayne County by 1891. Buffalo Shoals remained visible in historical sources, but the archive later associated the older name directly with Shoals.
The exact reason for dropping “Buffalo” remains uncertain from the records presently available. It may have been connected with postal practice, railroad usage, local preference, or simply the natural shortening of a familiar name.
What can be documented is that the transition happened during the same period when the Norfolk & Western Railway was transforming Twelvepole Creek.
The Norfolk & Western Comes to Shoals
The early 1890s brought one of the largest changes the valley had experienced.
The Norfolk & Western pushed its Ohio Extension toward the Ohio River, following the mountain waterways that offered the most practical route through Wayne County. Twelvepole Creek became a railroad corridor, and communities that had existed for generations suddenly found themselves connected to a much larger transportation network.
Shoals stood directly on that line.
Henry Gannett’s Gazetteer of West Virginia, published by the United States Geological Survey in 1904, described Shoals succinctly as a “post village in Wayne County on the Norfolk and Western Railway.” It also identified Shoal Branch as a tributary of Twelvepole Creek.
Another federal survey recorded the community even more precisely. While conducting spirit leveling along the Norfolk & Western from Shoals south toward Wayne, surveyors recorded “Shoals station, at road crossing,” with the top of the rail at an elevation of 572 feet. From there the route continued through Lavalette, Dickson, Ardel or Herbert, Craig, and Wayne. The same survey used Shoals as the starting point for a separate route running northeast toward Hodges.
Those dry federal measurements reveal something important.
Shoals was no longer simply a post office and mill settlement beside Twelvepole Creek. It had become a railroad point from which government surveyors measured routes in more than one direction.
The railroad changed the possibilities available to local residents. Mail could move faster. Manufactured goods became easier to obtain. Farmers and merchants gained better access to markets. Travelers could reach Huntington, Kenova, Wayne, and communities farther along the line with a reliability that horse travel and primitive roads could rarely match.
At the same time, the tracks did not erase the older Shoals economy. They ran through a community already shaped by mills, farms, stores, schools, and family networks.
Shoals in the Early Twentieth Century
The 1904 to 1905 state gazetteer provides one of the clearest snapshots of Shoals during this period.
It called Shoals a small village on the Norfolk & Western Railway, about fifteen miles northwest of Wayne and ten miles from Huntington. James Luther served as postmaster. The directory named W. W. Brumfield as a sawyer, O. B. Carrell as a notary, Lewis Defee and W. C. Perdue as general merchants, G. T. Elder as a physician, Jackson Herbert as a butcher, Hence Jones as a grist mill operator, James Luther as a blacksmith, and J. M. Plymale as operating a meat market.
In other words, the community described in 1885 had survived the coming of the railroad and adapted to it.
Shoals still had a mill. It still had a blacksmith. It still had stores and a physician. But it now stood on a railway that tied those older rural occupations to a regional transportation system.
The presence of a sawyer also points toward the continuing importance of timber. Wayne County remained heavily wooded, and both local construction and the larger regional timber economy created demand for sawn lumber. Shoals sat at the meeting point of several economies: agriculture, timber, retail trade, transportation, and small-scale professional services.
Memory of the Civil War Generation
Buffalo Shoals also remained part of the remembered geography of the Civil War generation.
In 1926, the Wayne County News interviewed Alderson Watts Sr., then eighty-one years old, during a return visit to Wayne County after decades away. Watts had lived at Buffalo Shoals as well as other places in the county and had entered Confederate service as a teenager. His family story captured the divided nature of the war in the Appalachian borderlands, since members of the extended Watts family served on opposing sides.
By the time Watts returned, the world of his youth had changed dramatically. The railroad ran through the Twelvepole valley, improved roads were beginning to reshape transportation, and small communities were becoming connected to Huntington in ways that would have seemed impossible before the war.
Yet he still remembered the place as Buffalo Shoals.
That persistence of the old name is a reminder that official maps and local memory do not always change at the same speed.
Agriculture During the Great Depression
Shoals remained connected to farming well into the twentieth century.
A National Archives finding aid for Farmers Home Administration records from the New Deal period identifies a file titled “Shoals Bull Service, West Virginia,” dated 1937 and associated with Wayne County. The record describes an application for funds and places the file in a federal collection devoted to community and cooperative agricultural services.
The same group of records contains other Wayne County livestock and agricultural projects, including bull services and a sorghum mill and evaporator. Such programs were designed to help rural communities improve agricultural production while sharing resources that individual farmers might not have been able to afford alone.
The Shoals file has not yet been fully examined online, so it would be premature to describe exactly how the local service operated. Still, its existence is significant.
More than fifty years after an 1885 correspondent wrote enthusiastically about corn, potatoes, and sorghum at Buffalo Shoals, federal records were still documenting agriculture under the Shoals name.
The economy had changed, but farming had not disappeared.
Roads, Railroads, and a Changing Community
By 1933, Shoals was formally listed within Union District alongside communities including Booten, Bowen, Dickson, Elmwood, Herbert, Lavalette, Wayne, and Winslow.
Transportation continued to determine the community’s future.
The original Norfolk & Western Twelvepole route lost much of its importance after the railroad developed a better route for heavy coal traffic farther south. In 1933, the central portion of the old Twelvepole line south of Wayne was abandoned, but the northern corridor from Wayne toward Kenova remained. Shoals stood on that surviving portion, preserving its railroad connection long after trains disappeared from many communities farther up Twelvepole Creek.
That surviving route eventually became known as part of the Wayne Branch. A modern rail-trail feasibility study traces the railroad through Shoals, identifying the community specifically as the line follows Twelvepole Creek toward Lavalette. The study also recognizes the historic Shoals dam and grist mill as part of the cultural landscape surrounding the corridor.
The possibility that an old railroad corridor might someday become a recreational trail would represent another transformation in a place repeatedly reshaped by transportation.
The creek came first. Roads followed its valley. Mills harnessed its water. The railroad laid tracks beside it. Automobiles shifted travel toward highways. Now preservation and recreation may give portions of the same corridor yet another use.
Why Shoals Matters
Shoals is easy to overlook if Appalachian history is measured only by population.
It was never a large industrial city. It did not develop into a major coal camp or county seat. There were no skyscrapers, enormous factories, or famous battles.
Yet the surviving evidence shows why communities like Shoals deserve to be remembered.
A school tradition reaches back to 1823. Bostic Brumfield remembered a forty-pupil classroom there in 1858. Buffalo Shoals possessed a federal post office by the 1860s. By 1885 it had daily mail, stores, physicians, a blacksmith, a schoolhouse, a sawmill, and a flouring mill. The Norfolk & Western connected it to a regional transportation system during the 1890s. By 1904, a federal gazetteer formally recognized Shoals as a post village on the railroad, while a business directory recorded merchants, a physician, a butcher, a sawyer, a grist mill operator, a blacksmith, and a postmaster. A 1906 postcard preserved the creek landscape and memory of Henry Luther’s lost mill. During the Great Depression, federal agricultural records still carried the Shoals name.
Taken together, those records reveal something larger than the history of a single Wayne County settlement.
Shoals represents the kind of rural Appalachian community that served generations without ever becoming large. Its importance came from connecting people. The school connected children. The mill connected farms. The post office connected families with the outside world. Stores and physicians served the surrounding countryside. The railroad connected Twelvepole Creek to regional markets and cities.
The names changed from Buffalo Shoals to Shoals, transportation shifted from creek roads to railroad tracks and highways, and many of the old businesses disappeared. Still, the community remains part of the same narrow valley where residents once waited for grain at the mill, collected letters at the post office, watched trains cross the road, and sent children to school with lessons written by goose-quill pen.
Shoals may be quieter today, but its history remains written along Twelvepole Creek.
Sources & Further Reading
Marshall University Archives and Special Collections. “Twelvepole Creek, Shoals, Wayne County, W.Va. 1906.” John Hawes Miller, Jr. West Virginia Postcard Collection. 1906. https://mds.marshall.edu/john_miller_west_postcard_collection/2
The Ceredo Advance. “A Short Trip up Twelve Pole.” October 22, 1885. Transcribed in Genealogy Trails, Wayne County, West Virginia. https://genealogytrails.com/wva/wayne/news_community.html
The Ceredo Advance. “Buffalo Sholes.” October 22, 1885. Transcribed in Genealogy Trails, Wayne County, West Virginia. https://genealogytrails.com/wva/wayne/news_community.html
Library of Congress. The Ceredo Advance. Ceredo, West Virginia, 1885–1939. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092392/
R. L. Polk & Co. West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1904–1905. Wheeling, WV: R. L. Polk & Co., 1904. Shoals entry. https://ldsgenealogy.com/WV/books/West-Virginia-state-gazetteer-and-business-directory-pt-2-part-23.htm
Gannett, Henry. Gazetteer of West Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 233. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0233/report.pdf
U.S. Geological Survey. Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1896 to 1908. Bulletin 399. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0399/report.pdf
U.S. Geological Survey. Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1896 to 1915. Bulletin 632. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0632/report.pdf
Wayne County News. “History of School System in Wayne County.” October 23, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191023.html
Wayne County News. “Old Timer Tell of Killing Deer in Wayne County.” August 9, 1923. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn230809.html
Wayne County News. “Wayne’s Seven Wonders.” December 23, 1923. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn231223.html
Wayne County News. Interview with Alderson Watts Sr. June 10, 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260610.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Wayne County News: Table of Contents.” Accessed October 10, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcntoc.html
United States Post Office Department. Post-Office Directory for 1866: Alphabetical List of Post-Offices in the United States, with the Names of Post-Masters. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1866. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Post-office_directory_for_1866._Alphabetical_list_of_post-offices_in_the_United_States%2C_with_the_names_of_post-masters_.._%28IA_cu31924030137404%29.pdf
United States Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–1971. Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
National Archives and Records Administration. “RG 96, Farmers Home Administration, General Correspondence of the Community and Cooperative Services Section.” Includes “Shoals Bull Service, West Virginia,” 1937, Wayne County. https://www.archives.gov/atlanta/finding-aids/rg96_correspondence_ent73.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Census Records: 1850–1950.” Washington, DC. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1850-1950
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia.” Entries for Buffalo Shoals and Shoals, Wayne County. Accessed October 10, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnams.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Based on the New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia, 1933. Accessed October 10, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/communities/districtplacenames.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “County Records on Microfilm: Wayne County.” Deeds, wills, appraisements, surveys, court orders, and vital records. Accessed October 10, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records: Birth Records.” Accessed October 10, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_bcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records: Marriage Records.” Accessed October 10, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_mcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records: Death Records.” Accessed October 10, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_dcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book, 1921. Charleston, WV, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
Krebs, Charles E., and D. D. Teets Jr. Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln Counties. County Geologic Report 4. Morgantown: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1913. https://books.google.com/books?id=ePNLAAAAMAAJ
West Virginia State Road Commission. Wayne County Highway Maps. 1933 and 1937. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/6604
U.S. Geological Survey. Lavalette Quadrangle, West Virginia. Surveyed 1957, published 1959. 1:24,000 topographic map. https://pastmaps.com/map/lavalette-wayne-county-wv-usgs-topo-1957-p1959
Marshall University Special Collections. Cabell-Wayne Historical Society Collection, 1880s–1974. Collection 0099. Marshall University. https://mds.marshall.edu/cabell_wayne_hist_soc_collection/
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Norfolk & Western Railway and Associated Companies Collection, 1851–1978. Ms2009-037. Blacksburg, VA. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/2456
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Norfolk & Western Railroad/Railway Company Records, 1876–ca. 1935. Ms2017-015. Blacksburg, VA. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/agents/corporate_entities/24
Interstate Commerce Commission. Interstate Commerce Commission Reports. Vol. 193. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1934, 363–69. Proceedings concerning abandonment of portions of the Norfolk & Western Twelvepole route. https://books.google.com/
“The Last of the ‘Twelve Pole’ Line.” Norfolk and Western Magazine 11, no. 11 (November 1933): 408–10. https://archive.org/
Kenny, Hamill. West Virginia Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning, Including the Nomenclature of the Streams and Mountains. Piedmont, WV: Place Name Press, 1945. https://babel.hathitrust.org/
Taylor, Mildred. History of Wayne County, West Virginia. Wayne, WV, 1963. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog
KYOVA Interstate Planning Commission. Wayne Branch Rail-Trail Feasibility Study. Huntington, WV, 2024. https://kyovaipc.org/Wayne_Branch_Rail_Trail_Feasibility_Study_12_Dec_2024_reduced.pdf
Author Note: Shoals is the kind of Appalachian community whose history grows considerably richer once the older name Buffalo Shoals is restored to the record. I hope this history helps preserve the schools, mills, railroad, farms, businesses, and families that once made this stretch of Twelvepole Creek a local center.