Buffaloe Road - Wake County

Sometimes the spelling of town or road will pique your interest.  Such is the case for Buffaloe Road in Wake County.  

Buffaloe Road at Interstate 540 (Charles Kunz)

Running from Capital Boulevard eastwards towards Knightdale and rural Eastern Wake County, this otherwise rather nondescript road gains your curiosity because of the "e" at the end of Buffaloe.  During my fifteen years living in Wake County - eight of them in Knightdale - I had always wondered if this was just a fancy spelling.  There are other Buffalo Roads nearby in Wendell (since renamed Wendell Falls Parkway) and in Johnston County - was the spelling done to differentiate?  Were buffalo once present in this area? Is it a family name?  

For nearly seven years, my wife and I played kickball off of Buffaloe Road, taken the kids to the Buffaloe Road Aquatic Center, even bowled once at Buffaloe Lanes (which are not located on Buffaloe Road). But it wasn't until recently that I decided to take a look into where the name came from.

Buffaloe Road comes from a family name.  Early ancestors of the name begin to appear in Wake County in the early 1800s.  The spellings can be Buffaloe, Buffalo, or Buffalow.  Interestingly, there is a Buffaloe Family Cemetery located in Raleigh's North Hills Park a few miles west of where Buffaloe Road starts/ends at Capital Boulevard.  Though I currently could not find any links to the family owning land on, through, or adjacent to the road, I would guess that the family had some interests in the area and the road was named after them.