Buffalo

Buffalo, a town in northern Leon County where U.S. 79 crosses Interstate 45, was established in 1872 on the International Railroad, which merged the next year into the International and Great Northern and named for the herds of buffalo that had once roamed the area. The last link of the railroad was completed about four miles from the town in April or May of 1872. Before the rails arrived, Buffalo's settlers had shipped their cotton by river and driven their livestock to market. A post office opened in 1876. The community's first school, a two-story building, later served as the community center, known as the Opera House, and then as a hotel until the late 1940s. Between 1890 and 1892 the reported population grew from 200 to 500, and during the 1890s the town had a general store, saloons, cotton gins, a milliner, druggists and Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches.

Buffalo was incorporated in 1913 with an area of four square miles, lost its charter in 1917 and was later incorporated again. It reported 650 people in 1929, 470 in 1931 and 850 in 1939. In 1938 its schools enrolled 510 students, 342 white and 168 Black, and seven other districts were merged into Buffalo's between 1929 and 1970. Passenger trains stopped serving the town in 1970. By then U.S. 75 through Buffalo was giving way to Interstate 45, which opened from Centerville to Buffalo in 1969 and on to Fairfield in 1971. The population reached 1,555 in 1990 and 1,804 in 2000, and in the 1990s the town held a watermelon festival and a Labor Day weekend festival called the Buffalo Stampede.