Wedding DJ at The Maola at Riverside in New Bern, NC

The Space

Before this was a wedding venue, it was North Carolina’s largest lumber mill, run by the Roper Lumber Company from the late 1800s into the 1930s, processing up to 125,000 feet of lumber a day when it was new. After the Great Depression the site became a repair facility for Maola’s dairy trucks, and the Maola name stuck through nearly eighty years of dairy production before the plant closed in 2014. Mike Hawkins bought the building in 2017 and turned it into an event venue.

The main reception room, the Creamery Collective, keeps the industrial bones on display: 24-foot ceilings and exposed brick walls that make clear this was a working building before it was a party room. Named spaces throughout the property carry the site’s history forward, Cedar Grove Sanctuary, Lumber Lounge, and Riverside Retreat among them, so a couple moving through the building for photos passes through rooms that each look and feel distinct from the last.

Capacity & Layout

Indoors, the Creamery Collective seats 300 or more, and the grounds can hold over 1,000 guests standing for larger outdoor events, so the venue scales from a mid-size wedding up to something closer to a festival. Ceremonies can happen outdoors at the Riverside Retreat, directly on the Neuse River, or indoors at Cedar Grove Sanctuary, giving couples a real choice between a waterfront setting and a covered one without needing a rain-plan compromise.

The 15,000-square-foot building gives the layout room to breathe: reception, cocktail space, and the get-ready suites are separated enough that the wedding party is not tripping over caterers setting tables. A stage sized 16×16 or 8×16 is available for the band or DJ setup, and two Bluetooth-accessible sound systems are built into the Creamery Collective, so the venue is already wired for amplified sound rather than leaving it entirely to outside equipment.

Amenities

The Bridal Haven inside the Creamery Collective offers six to nine makeup stations, floor-length mirrors, plush couches, and a TV, enough room for a full wedding party to get ready without waiting in line for a mirror. The Groom’s Den next door leans the other direction entirely, with a slot machine, a poker table, a mini golf green, cornhole, foosball, and mini-basketball, giving the groomsmen somewhere to actually spend the afternoon instead of standing around.

Outdoors, fire pits, solo stoves, and space heaters extend the season into cooler months, and a six-person golf cart helps guests move across the grounds. The venue is BYOB with an ABC license required and no glass bottles allowed, and complimentary Wi-Fi and a walk-in cooler round out the practical side of hosting a few hundred guests through a full evening.

Location & Getting There

The venue sits close to downtown New Bern and about 4.1 miles from Coastal Carolina Regional Airport, keeping travel time short for guests flying in. Over 300 on-site parking spots mean guests and vendors are not competing for street parking in a historic riverfront area, and the property runs year-round with its busiest months from March through June and September through December.

A 10pm noise ordinance is in effect out of respect for residential neighbors, so the schedule needs to build toward that cutoff rather than past it. Inside the Creamery Collective, the exposed brick and tall 24-foot ceilings give the room a lively, resonant sound that suits a DJ well, while the built-in sound systems mean less equipment to haul in and a reliable baseline to build the reception’s audio around.