Walk the courthouse square this month and you'll pass a two-story brick building with a for-sale sign that wasn't there a year ago, sitting empty for the second time in two years. It's the old Tyson and Jones Buggy building at 106 S. Ray Street, and if you've lived in Carthage for more than a year, you already know its recent history is not a straight line. It's a building that keeps almost making it.
Meanwhile, three blocks over, a place with no ribbon cutting and no brewery attached has hosted karaoke every Friday night for years without a single headline written about it.
That contrast is the real story of downtown Carthage right now, and it says something the boarded-up building never could: the square doesn't run on its landmark. It runs on the stuff that shows up on schedule.
For decades before 2023, the old buggy factory sat empty. It's the building that gave Carthage its old nickname, "buggy town," from the era when Tyson and Jones turned out roughly 3,000 horse-drawn carriages a year at its 1890 peak, before the last one rolled out in 1925. After that, the building mostly just sat there, boarded up and waiting.
In June 2023, Southern Pines Brewing Co. broke ground on a plan to turn the building into a restaurant, taproom, and small brewery. Company founder Micah Niebauer and Carthage's mayor stood in front of a crowd that day, and the mayor called it a project that would really help the town's downtown revitalization. The Buggy Factory opened the following May with a speakeasy bar, an outdoor performance courtyard, and a menu built around Detroit-style pizza.
It didn't stick. By December 2024, the restaurant had reopened with a stripped-down, beer-first menu of smash burgers and fried chicken sandwiches. Niebauer told a local outlet the earlier concept had been too formal and just didn't resonate with the community.
That reset didn't hold either. Southern Pines Brewing Co. closed the Carthage location for good on December 31, 2025, alongside its remaining Southern Pines taproom, after First Citizens Bank sued the company over more than $2 million in loans tied to the Carthage renovation and a new Fayetteville taproom. As of an April 2026 report, the building sits vacant again, expected to go up for sale, with no listing date set.
Here's the timeline in one place:
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| Before 2023 | The 1856 buggy factory sits vacant, left in disrepair for decades |
| June 2023 | Southern Pines Brewing Co. breaks ground on a restaurant, taproom, and brewery |
| May 2024 | The Buggy Factory opens with a speakeasy bar and courtyard stage |
| December 2024 | Reopens with a simplified, beer-first menu after the first concept struggles |
| December 2025 | Southern Pines Brewing Co. closes the Carthage location amid a loan lawsuit |
| April 2026 | The building sits vacant again, headed for a sale with no set date |
Two concepts in under two years, inside a building the county's own economic development office once framed as the thing that would anchor downtown's comeback. It didn't work out that way. Something else did.
While the marquee building cycled through openings and closures, Time Out Sports Grill on Monroe Street kept doing exactly what it's always done. Monday nights are Bingo Bash at 7 p.m. Thursdays bring Music Bingo, also at 7, run by a local DJ outfit called Dye Entertainment. Fridays shift into a karaoke and dance party that runs from 8 p.m. until midnight. Once a month, the Cruzin 4 Kidz Car Club of Moore County turns the parking lot into a cruise-in open to any car, truck, or motorcycle owner who wants to show up and talk shop.
None of that required a groundbreaking ceremony. None of it made the news. It just happened, week after week, through the exact stretch of time when the building three blocks away was opening, closing, reopening, and closing again.
The Jive Hive keeps a similar rhythm for anyone who wants live music without the sports-bar energy, a small grassroots venue built around local and regional acts in a quieter setting. Buggy Town Coffee has been open long enough that the Buggy Factory itself sourced ingredients from it during its brief run. And if you're the kind of household that plans a Saturday around something a little unusual, the Kitten Around Cat Lounge on Courthouse Square lets you get a coffee alongside a room full of resident cats, open a few afternoons a week.
None of these places are glamorous. That's sort of the point.
Downtown's food and produce scene splits across two separate markets that don't compete so much as cover different needs. The Carthage Farmers Market sets up downtown on Fridays, seasonal, walkable from the square. The Moore County Farmers Market runs on Thursdays year round at the Armory Sports Complex, a few minutes away, for the weeks when the downtown market isn't running.
If you're new to the rhythm here, that's the practical version: Thursday for the reliable, year-round option, Friday for the seasonal downtown one when it's in season. Neither one needed a brewery next door to survive, and neither one has missed a beat regardless of what's happening at 106 S. Ray Street.
It's worth remembering what's actually permanent on this square. The Historic Moore County Courthouse, a three-story Indiana limestone building completed in 1923 and designed by architect Christopher Gadsden Sayre, sits on the traffic island at the center of downtown. Moore County itself dates to 1784, carved out of Cumberland County and named for Alfred Moore, a Revolutionary War veteran who went on to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
The county has kept building around it. A newer courthouse addition opened in 2024 as part of a roughly $53 million expansion connected to the existing 47,000-square-foot courts facility, and county offices a block away are exactly why Niebauer originally bet on foot traffic from courthouse workers wanting a walkable lunch. That foot traffic is real. County employment doesn't take a night off, and neither does the square it surrounds. What it couldn't do was guarantee that any single restaurant concept would land. The building had built-in customers and still went through two tries.
That's the pattern worth sitting with if you live here. The parts of downtown Carthage that are actually growing right now, including new neighborhoods a short drive out and a mixed-use development approved in the old Little River golf community that could eventually push the town's population past 5,000, aren't waiting on one building to figure itself out. They're building around the square's existing habits, not its most recent headline.
Here's the detail that makes the whole thing land. Every May, on Mother's Day weekend, Carthage still runs its Buggy Festival, now in its 37th year, drawing more than 150 craft and food vendors, a free kids' zone, and live bands booked in from as far as Myrtle Beach and Fayetteville. It's a festival built entirely around the memory of the Tyson and Jones carriage factory, held every year like clockwork, even in a year when the actual building sat empty with a for-sale sign on it.
That's Carthage in one image. The town will celebrate its buggy history without hesitation. It just doesn't need the buggy building itself to be open to do it.
If you're weighing whether a place like Carthage fits the way you want to live, that steadiness is worth more than any single building's fortunes. A downtown that keeps its Monday bingo, its Thursday market, and its May festival running through two restaurant concepts and a lawsuit is a downtown with real footing, landmark or no landmark.
If you'd like to talk through what that kind of steady, small-town rhythm means for buying or selling in Moore County, Jamie McDevitt would love to connect.
Jamie will take the time to understand your goals and will work tirelessly to help you reach them. Whether you are moving to the Pinehurst, Southern Pines area to play golf, swing a tennis racket, or simply run or walk through your neighborhood, let Jamie work for you.
