The Story of Buff Creek

The name “Buff Creek” is itself a window into history. Throughout the Appalachian frontier, “buff” and “buffalo” place names mark the trails and watering holes once used by the Eastern bison ( Bison bison) — herds that roamed these valleys by the thousands before European settlement. The creek was named for the buffalo that drank from its waters, wore paths along its banks, and attracted the hunters — both indigenous and colonial — who followed them.

The land beneath 472 Buff Creek Road sits within the Appalachian Plateau Province, a vast, westward-tilting tableland of nearly horizontal sedimentary rock deposited during the Paleozoic Era (540–250 million years ago). The bedrock belongs to the Kanawha Formation of the Pennsylvanian-age Pottsville Group — a thick sequence of sandstone, shale, siltstone, and coal beds laid down when this region was a swampy coastal plain near the equator.

Like all waterways in this area, Buff Creek exists because of the Teays River — believed to be the second-oldest river on Earth. Before the Pleistocene Ice Ages, the Teays was a massive waterway that carved the broad valley where Hurricane now sits. When continental glaciers blocked and destroyed the Teays roughly 800,000 years ago, the smaller streams that remained — including Hurricane Creek and its tributaries like Buff Creek — inherited the drainage of this ancient landscape.

Buff Creek flows through a narrow hollow cut into the Appalachian Plateau’s sandstone and shale — classic dissected plateau topography with steep, forested hillsides rising from the creek bottom. Elevations range from roughly 600 feet at the creek to over 1,000 feet on the surrounding ridges. The original ecosystem was Appalachian mixed mesophytic forest — one of the most biodiverse temperate forest types on Earth, with canopies containing up to 50 hardwood species.

The first Euro-American settlers in the Hurricane area followed paths already worn by centuries of buffalo traffic and indigenous use. James Conner, arriving from eastern Virginia in 1777, conducted extensive exploration and obtained substantial land grants — potentially 4,000–5,000 acres in the region.

Creek hollows like Buff Creek were settled by families who claimed narrow strips of bottomland along the water, with grazing rights extending up the hillsides. The “Buff Creek” name — recorded in early land documents — suggests that buffalo were still present or recently gone when the first deeds were filed. Eastern bison were essentially extirpated from West Virginia by the early 1800s, but their memory persisted in dozens of place names across the state: Buffalo, Buff Creek, Buffalo Village, Great Buffalo Lick.

Putnam County was established on March 11, 1848, from portions of Kanawha, Mason, and Cabell counties. The 1850 census recorded 5,336 residents. Families along Buff Creek would have done their legal business at the courthouse in Winfield, the county seat on the Kanawha River.

West Virginia is a “state land state” where property was described using metes and bounds — natural landmarks, compass bearings, and measured distances. Property histories along Buff Creek must be traced through the Putnam County Courthouse and the West Virginia State Archives.

The Civil War divided Putnam County — roughly 400 soldiers served on each side. The Battle of Scary Creek on July 17, 1861, was the first Confederate victory in the Kanawha Valley. For families in the creek hollows, the war brought uncertainty, divided loyalties, and economic hardship as the regional salt and agricultural economies were disrupted.

The construction of Interstate 64 in the 1960s transformed the entire region. While I-64 runs through the Teays Valley north of the Buff Creek hollow, its impact was felt everywhere — Hurricane became a bedroom community for Charleston and Huntington, and the surrounding countryside gradually transitioned from agricultural to residential use.

• 1957The Winfield Bridge connected both halves of Putnam County across the Kanawha River.
• 1960sInterstate 64 placed Hurricane on the Charleston–Huntington corridor.
• 1990sToyota established a major manufacturing facility, becoming one of the county’s largest employers.
• 2020Putnam County reached 57,440 residents, making it one of the fastest-growing counties in West Virginia.