Town where ‘The Hunger Games’ movie District 12 scenes were filmed put up for sale
The former company store in Henry River Mill Village was transformed into the Mellark family bakery in District 12 in The Hunger Games movie. (Photo by Margo Metzger/VisitNC.com.)
If you’re looking to learn what it’s like to live in The Hunger Games’ District 12, here’s a deal for you.
The district is for sale. Kind of.
The town where scenes in District 12 were shot for the recently released Hunger Games movie, Henry River Mill Village, is for sale. Wade Shepherd, the owner of the 72-acre property near Hildebran, N.C., put the town up for sale after the village’s recent popularity with fans visiting the now-vacant area.
Of course you’ll have to pay. He’s set the list price at $1.4 million.
North Carolina tourism officials are hoping to catch in on the movie hoopla as well, putting together hotel packages, tours, re-enactments and survivor classes in and around where the movie was shot, the Associated Press reported.
As for the town that’s for sale, it’s a town that was abandoned in the 1970s when the namesake mill burned down. But the support buildings remained, making it a seemingly-ideal place to film a movie about a rundown industrial-era community. The local sheriff’s department is working with private security guards to keep people away from the village out of fear that someone could get hurt, opening Shepherd up to a lawsuit, according to the AP.
“We’ve had visitors by the thousands,” Shepherd said to the U.K.’s Sun newspaper. “This Saturday alone we had more than 200 here at once from every corner of the country.”
Shepherd said he hoped a Hunger Games fan would buy the property, because they’d be more likely to preserve it — though he admitted to the AP that he’s never read the books himself.