Wharves and warehouses began to be built to help speed the productive country crops to New York, southern ports, and the West Indies.  Burned down during the Revolution in 1779, the waterfront was rebuilt in earnest in the years following the war and the fledgling port was dubbed Mill River Village.  By the 1830s, the narrow, shallow harbor was said, despite its shortcomings, to be the busiest in proportion to its size between New York and Boston, a testament to the hard work of its inhabitants.  The boomtown residents dubbed this thriving village Southport around this time, perhaps to signal that they were a port town, not just a riverside village.  Eventually, they became world famous, not for the port itself, but for the Southport Globe Onion grown on local farms and shipped from the harbor by the millions in the mid 1800s.  This onion can still be found in the Burpee catalog today.