The Buoy Yard was a landmark on Washington’s waterfront for generations. Crowds gathered on the wharves when the Holly and Jessamine , 156-foot-long sidewheel steamers, maneuvered in the stream, their wheels churning the dark water, approaching or departing government dock. There’s now nothing to mark the yard’s existence, not even one of the massive iron buoys thrown about by the 1913 hurricane. US Lighthouse Service Tender Jessamine , 1885. Photo credit: United States Light

Since the Civil War, the strident whine of massive saws and the smell of sawdust dominated Washington’s waterfront. Steam whistles echoed between the riverbanks as tugs towed rafts of logs to the mills or hauled barges with milled lumber from the wharves. The mill whistles kept cadence with the workday. Men shouted to each other as they balanced on floating logs, herding them toward the steam hoist that would drag them into the mill. It was a loud, bustling, boisterous waterf

2 of 3 on Prohibition In 1832, Washington, NC, resident and physician William Shaw delivered a series of lectures to the Washington Temperance Society where he indicted intemperance as a “source of disease” and a “national evil.” The consumption of alcohol “fills prisons with dishonest, weak, and wicked criminals…fills alms houses with paupers…makes tens of thousands of men poor and wretched, and leaves their widows indigent and destitute [and throws] on the charity of this c

1 of 3 on Prohibition North Carolina has had a long, contentious relationship with liquor, a relationship muddled by religion and politics, rural culture, women’s suffrage, and racism. Early in the Republic, “American whiskey was usually 50 percent alcohol; not aged; colorless; cheaper than coffee, tea, milk, or beer; and safer than water, since alcohol killed germs.” [1] Scotch-Irish immigrants were already experienced distilling small batches of whiskey and brandy when they