The candy man can; Dead men tell no tales, but J. Brooks West III dug up one--who had never been alive--to promote his company.

• Author: Brantley, Michael K.
• Position: FEATURE

Even in Momeyer, a place that smells like peaches year round despite the lack of orchards, some find him odd. He has been known to stroll around this Nash County hamlet of some 300 souls and down the road in Nashville--population 4,000-dressed in purple and wearing a top hat. Or decked out like Uncle Sam. That's on special occasions. His preferred habit is seersucker suit, bow tie and spectacles, which makes him resemble Orville Redenbacher, or period pinstripes in which he looks like a Prohibition-era banker. But life is sweet these days for J. Brooks West III, or as he would like for you to know him, J.W. Butterfield.

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Which explains that peach smell. It comes from a blue metal building just off U.S. 64, a former machine shop where workers with lathes, welders and torches used to grind and polish metal. Men still work there, though the scent of oil and hot metal is gone. Using equipment old as they are--and recipes even older--they mix, knead and mold candy the way it was done a generation ago.

J.W. Butterfield is a marketing persona of that, one that had worked for years, making Butterfields Candy Co. modestly successful. But not long ago, the company got one of those breaks that business owners dream of. In April, Food Network diva Rachael Ray plugged a one-inch piece of hard candy produced here as her snack of the day. "Immediately, the phone started ringing and we started getting e-mails," says West, president and owner of Sweet Concepts Inc., the holding company for Butterfields. "We have been loading the fax machine three times a day with paper. Sales people from all over the country are calling, wanting to represent us."

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Ray had run across Peach Buds, the company's flagship product. When she tasted one, she found out what gourmet-shop patrons have known for years: This is no ordinary hard candy. National recognition came quickly but Butterfields is no overnight success. In one form or another, it has been around since 1924, when it started as Cane Candy Co., making holiday sweets in Winston-Salem. It later moved to Greensboro and, in the 1950s, to Wilson, where it took the name Wilson Candy Co. It was still called that after moving to Rocky Mount, where West's former wife, Tracey, ran across the operation and bought it in 1989. A partner in the Australian group that then owned conveyor-belt maker Belt Concepts Inc. in nearby Spring Hope, she thought the candy company had potential as an...