Walk the courthouse circle this week and you'll see two unrelated stories sitting on top of each other. Behind the wavy glass of the old Tyson and Jones building, the room that used to smell like wood-fired pizza and hoppy lager sits dark. A few hundred feet away, crews are staging equipment to tear up the traffic circle itself, the first cut into a construction project that will run through the end of the year. Both things are true. Neither one tells you what downtown Carthage actually feels like on a Tuesday in September.
Here's what the two headlines miss when you read them side by side: the empty building and the torn-up street are coincidental, not connected. And the part of downtown that residents actually use week to week, coffee, casual dinners, live music, weekend markets, hasn't slowed down at all. If anything, it's the part of the story nobody's telling.
The Building Everyone's Watching
The Tyson and Jones Buggy Company building has carried more symbolic weight than square footage for most of its life. Built in 1856 as the office for what became one of the largest carriage manufacturers in the South, the company was turning out around 3,000 buggies a year at its 1890 peak before delivering its last one in 1925. The building sat vacant for decades after that, which is why its 2023 redevelopment by Southern Pines Brewing Company felt like a turning point. Owner Micah Niebauer broke ground that June, and at the ceremony Carthage's mayor called it a project that would "really help with our downtown revitalization."
It didn't go smoothly. The Buggy Factory opened in May 2024 during that year's Buggy Fest, closed temporarily that September after laying off around 30 employees, then reopened two months later with a simpler pub menu built around fried chicken sandwiches and smash burgers. Niebauer later said the original concept was "higher priced, more formal" and that it "did not resonate with this community." By December 2025, Southern Pines Brewing announced it was closing every remaining taproom, Carthage included, a decision that followed a lawsuit from First Citizens Bank against Niebauer seeking more than $2 million. By spring 2026, the building was described in a Pilot editorial as vacant once again.
So the anchor is gone. That part of the narrative is accurate. What it isn't is a verdict on downtown as a whole, because almost nothing else that makes up daily life downtown was ever tied to that one building.
The Same Week, a Different Project Started
The traffic circle closure has nothing to do with the brewery. It's phase one of a downtown revitalization project years in the planning, and construction on the circle is scheduled to begin Monday, August 31. Crews will close the southern half of the circle first, install four storm drains and underground piping beneath the roadway, and add pedestrian islands and improved crosswalks near the courthouse. Eastbound drivers get rerouted onto Ray Street for the duration.
Town Manager Emily Yopp has been updating the Board of Commissioners on the schedule, and the contractor is targeting a Dec. 31 completion for this phase. Officials have said county offices and downtown businesses will stay accessible throughout, with the county parking lot remaining available. A separate, unrelated repair is happening at the same time on Summit Street, where underground culverts damaged by last year's Tropical Storm Chantal are getting replaced with FEMA funding, contractor Fred Smith Company handling both pipes. Two projects, two funding sources, one construction season. If your GPS routes you somewhere strange downtown this fall, that's why.
What Filled the Gap While Nobody Was Looking
While the Buggy Factory's fate played out in headlines, a much smaller story landed with almost no fanfare: Moore Coffee, aiming for a June opening on Courthouse Square, has been open through the summer. Owners Allen and Johanna Williams moved to Carthage in 2021 and call themselves Carthaginians ever since. The shop runs 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Saturday, closed Sunday, and along with pastries and New York style bagels, they sell houseplants with QR codes attached so you can look up care instructions on your phone. It's a small detail, but it says something about what they're building. "What we are going for is hospitality," Allen told the Sandhills Sentinel, describing a shop meant to be more than a coffee counter.
That's a modest opening compared to a 30-tap brewery with a covered beer garden and its own stage. But it's also the kind of business that survives on regulars rather than events, which means it doesn't depend on downtown foot traffic clearing a construction zone to stay open. If you're looking for where the actual replacement energy downtown is coming from, it's a coffee shop with plants for sale, not another restaurant trying to fill a building that took the last one two tries to get right.
The Weekly Stuff That Never Needed the Circle
Most of what residents actually do downtown on a given week was never centered on the Buggy Factory to begin with. Time Out Sports Grill keeps a regular karaoke night hosted by Rick Enright, along with line dancing and music bingo through the week, plus a monthly car show through the Cruzin 4 Kidz Car Club of Moore County. Casa Garcia and La Familia Mexican Grill are still running their usual lunch and dinner service. The Soup Company, tucked near Second Chapter Bookstore, is still the move on a day you don't want a full meal.
The two farmers markets residents rely on run on different schedules and it's easy to mix them up:
| Market | Day | Location | Season |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carthage Farmers Market | Fridays | Downtown, near the courthouse square | Seasonal |
| Moore County Farmers Market | Thursdays | Armory Sports Complex | Year-round |
Neither one runs anywhere near the construction zone, and neither one has anything to do with what's happening to the Tyson and Jones building. Hillcrest Park, with its playground, splash pad, and sports fields, is similarly untouched. None of this is new information residents don't already have day to day. What's useful is seeing it laid out against the two headlines that make downtown sound emptier than it is.
The Venue That Was Never Downtown to Begin With
If you want proof that Carthage's social calendar doesn't run through the courthouse circle, look at The Jive Hive. It operates out of the Shady Grove Rural Community Arts Center on Vass-Carthage Road, well outside downtown proper, and it's had a full season regardless of anything happening at the circle. Colorado jam band Sqwerv played there in April. Asheville's Toubab Krewe played in June. Nashville-based Airshow closed out the summer booking calendar in August. It's a self-described rustic, grassroots space, and it's been building its own following independent of whatever's open or closed a few miles away downtown.
That's worth sitting with. The venue doing the most consistent live-music programming in the Carthage area isn't downtown at all, and it never needed to be.
What This Adds Up To
Carthage's identity has always been tangled up with buggies, literally. The downtown mural depicts the town's carriage-making history, the annual Buggy Festival every May draws on it directly, and that's exactly why an empty Tyson and Jones building reads as a bigger loss than its square footage alone would suggest. It's the town's origin story sitting dark on the courthouse square.
But an empty landmark and a torn-up traffic circle are two separate facts, not one story about decline. The town's infrastructure investment is proceeding on a real schedule with real grant funding behind it. A new coffee shop just landed on the square and is already open six days a week. The weekly rhythms, karaoke nights, farmers markets, a music venue that was never downtown in the first place, kept running through all of it. If you live here, that's probably closer to what your actual week looks like than either headline suggests.
Meese Property Group keeps close watch on what's actually happening in Moore County towns like Carthage, not just the market data but the businesses, projects, and small changes that shape daily life here. If you're curious what a specific block or neighborhood in Carthage looks like up close, or you're weighing a move within the Sandhills, reach out to Meese Property Group for a personalized consultation grounded in what's actually on the ground.
