Carthage's Courthouse Square Used to Close at Five. It Doesn't Anymore.

For most of its history, downtown Carthage ran on courthouse hours. The Moore County Courthouse anchors the square, cases get heard, deeds get filed, and by five o'clock the parking spots around the traffic circle empty out. If you wanted dinner and a reason to linger, you drove to Southern Pines or Pinehurst. That was the pattern for long enough that most residents still plan their evenings around it without thinking twice.

The pattern broke sometime between 2024 and now, and it broke in a specific, traceable way. Two businesses opened on the square within weeks of each other, one of them failed at its first attempt and came back with a completely different operating model, and the fix tells you more about how Carthage actually spends an evening than the opening ever did.

The Square That Ran on Government Hours

Before any of this, the square's daytime rhythm was already dependable. The Historic Moore County Courthouse, a 1923 Renaissance Revival building designed by architect Christopher Gadsden Sayre, sits at the center of the traffic island that gives the square its shape. The Moore County Library a few blocks over runs a standing Friday morning preschool storytime and a baby storytime for newborns to 18 months, the kind of recurring appointment that fills a Tuesday or Friday for a parent without needing to check a calendar twice. Lunch happened at places like The Soup Company, a short walk from where Second Chapter Books would later open, or at Pete's Family Restaurant.

That was daytime Carthage: reliable, civic, done by suppertime. The evening was mostly a gap.

What the Buggy Factory's Second Attempt Actually Fixed

The building that changed that is the old Tyson & Jones Buggy Company factory at 106 S. Ray Street, built in 1856 and, by the mid-1800s through the 1920s, the source of horse-drawn carriages shipped across the rural South. Southern Pines Brewing Co. owner Micah Niebauer took it on as The Buggy Factory, opening May 22, 2024 with a full build-out: a restaurant and bar on the main floor serving Detroit-style pizza as the signature dish, a brewhouse downstairs, and a speakeasy cocktail bar called the Tyson & Jones Room slated to debut alongside a July 12 grand opening. The hours matched the ambition. Wednesday and Thursday ran 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and again from 4 to 10 p.m., with Friday and Saturday stretching the evening seating to 11 p.m.

It closed on September 30, four months later, laying off around 30 employees. In a conversation with The Pilot, Niebauer pointed to price sensitivity and an automatic 20 percent gratuity as factors that cost the restaurant local goodwill during a stretch when regulars were already choosing carefully where to spend a night out.

The reopening on December 20 wasn't a soft relaunch. It was a different restaurant wearing the same address. Chef Chuck Jones replaced the original menu with a shorter one built around a smash burger, a fried chicken sandwich, pizza, salad, and hand-cut fries, and the hours moved with it.

Look at what actually changed. The new Buggy Factory dropped the lunch shift almost entirely and rebuilt itself as an afternoon-into-evening destination. That's not a smaller version of the same restaurant. It's an admission that the demand on this square was never really at noon. It's after work, when the courthouse crowd has gone home and the people who actually live in Carthage are deciding whether to cook or go out.

The Bookstore That Filled the Other Gap

Second Chapter Books opened in July 2024 at 103 Monroe Street, a few doors from the courthouse traffic circle, and it filled the daytime half of the equation the Buggy Factory eventually walked away from. Owners Karen and Brad Lewis built it as a new-and-used shop with a stated goal, as Karen told Sandhills Sentinel, of making reading affordable rather than a luxury. The store relocated a short distance within the square in January 2025, and it runs a standing biweekly book club that gives regulars a reason to walk over on a set schedule, the same logic that makes the library's storytimes sticky.

Where the Buggy Factory's fix was to lean into evening hours, Second Chapter Books leaned the other way, becoming a daytime browsing stop for people already downtown for the courthouse, the library, or lunch. Together they cover more of the day than either could alone.

Where the Recurring Nights Actually Live

If the Buggy Factory supplies the food, Time Out Sports Grill supplies the standing appointment. The restaurant hosts a regular karaoke and dance night, 21 and up after 9 p.m., and it's also become the site for the monthly Cruzin 4 Kidz Car Club of Moore County car show, a recurring gathering that turns the parking lot into a rotating display of local cars once a month rather than a one-off event.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A single festival draws a crowd once a year. A monthly car show and a recurring karaoke night build the kind of habit that makes a square feel occupied on an ordinary Tuesday, not just during the one weekend everyone already circles on the calendar.

The One Weekend Everything Overlaps

That one weekend is the Carthage Buggy Festival, and it's worth understanding on its own terms. Started in 1989 to commemorate the same Tyson & Jones Buggy Company that gave the Buggy Factory its name and its building, the festival is always held on the Saturday of Mother's Day weekend, right at 1 Courthouse Square. Admission is free, and the event draws an estimated 20,000 people to a single Saturday, with more than 130 food and craft vendors lining the historic downtown streets alongside a classic car show and continuous stage entertainment.

The Carthage Rotary Club's July 4th parade adds a second annual anchor, stepping off from Downtown Carthage at 11 a.m. on the holiday itself.

These two dates are the only points on the calendar when the daytime civic rhythm and the evening social rhythm actually share the same block at the same hour. The rest of the year, they run on parallel tracks: courthouse and library and bookstore by day, Buggy Factory and Time Out Sports Grill by night. The festival and the parade are when the whole square, for one Saturday at a time, stops being two separate schedules and becomes one.

What This Means for a Tuesday Night

If you already live near the square, the practical version of all this is simple. The Buggy Factory is not a lunch option anymore, so plan dinner instead, and expect it closed on Mondays. Second Chapter Books is your daytime stop, and worth checking for the next book club date if you're the type who likes a standing plan rather than a spontaneous one. Time Out Sports Grill is the closest thing the square has to a weekly ritual, between the karaoke nights and the monthly car show. And if you're building a longer evening out of it:

1. Swing by Second Chapter Books in the late afternoon while the shop is still on its daytime schedule.
2. Head to The Buggy Factory once it opens for dinner service, generally starting around 3 p.m.
3. Finish the night a few blocks over at Time Out Sports Grill if it happens to be a karaoke night or a Cruzin 4 Kidz car show.

None of that existed as a real option two years ago. The square had the courthouse, the library, and a handful of daytime lunch spots, and then it emptied out. What's different now isn't that Carthage got busier. It's that the businesses on the square figured out, sometimes the hard way, which hours actually had demand behind them, and built their schedules to match.

If you're watching how a small county seat like Carthage continues to fill in around its historic center, that's the kind of shift worth paying attention to, not because of what it says about any single restaurant, but because of what it says about where the town's evening energy actually lives now. The Gentry Team keeps an eye on these changes across every corner of Moore County, from courthouse squares to golf-course neighborhoods, and we're always glad to talk through what a given block or village is becoming, whether you're already living there or just curious about the place next door.