From Old South to New South to Newest South

By Tom Hanchett, Community Historian

Charlotte looks like a brand new city, but there’s a lot of history here.  Its roots run deep in the Old South, way back before the American Revolution.

As the New South dawned after the Civil War, Charlotte took off, first as railroad junction then as a cotton mill hub. 

Today it is America’s second biggest banking center and one of the nation’s fastest growing metropolitan areas. Newcomers roll in daily from across the U.S. and around the globe. 

There’s a sense of possibility, of change, so strong that it can be disconcerting – or energizing. Charlotte is a place that asks you to dig in, to find connections … to make history yourself.

Charlotte in the Old South

Charlotte calls itself the Queen City. Why? The nickname is a hint that this community is older than the United States.  

King George still ruled the Colonies when European settlers chartered the town back in 1768. They named the new hamlet after the King’s wife, Queen Charlotte, and gave the surrounding county the name Mecklenburg in honor of her birthplace in Germany. 

Look at a map and you’ll still see the Colonial grid of nearly square blocks in today’s Center City.  The main street still carries the name of North Carolina’s Colonial governor William Tryon. 

But an interesting detail – Tryon Street does not align to the compass, as in many Colonial towns.  Instead, it runs along a low ridgeline. That’s because it is older than European settlement.  Tyron Street follows the Nations Path, the great trading route of the Catawba and other Indians, which ran from Georgia up to the Chesapeake Bay.  Today’s Interstate 85 traces that same route.

The Tryon Street ridgeline is the reason behind Charlotte’s custom of calling its downtown “Uptown.”  Head to Independence Square at the heart of the center city;  no matter which way you approach, you’ll be going gently upward.

Independence Square got its name during the American Revolution.  In May of 1775, over a year before Patriot leaders signed the Declaration of Independence, Charlotte made its own statement defying Britain.  The Mecklenburg Resolves of May 31 declared the “authority of the King or Parliament” to be “null and void.”  

Tradition holds that there was even a full-blown Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence on May 20, 1775. But no copies exist and it appeared in no Colonial newspapers nor other records.

That June a local tavern-keeper named James Jack carried important papers – the Resolves? the Mec Dec? – to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. You’ll find a statue of Jack on horseback galloping along Little Sugar Creek Greenway east of Uptown.

Late in the Revolution, British General Cornwallis swept into town … and soon wished he hadn’t. Local sharpshooters peppered his men mercilessly in the 1780 Battle of Charlotte and the Battle of Kings Mountain nearby. 

As he departed, it is said, Cornwallis wrote in his diary that Charlotte was a “hornet’s nest of rebellion.” Today the hornet and hornets’ nest are popular civic symbols, seen most memorably in Charlotte’s NBA basketball team the Hornets.  

After the Revolution, a totally unexpected event put Charlotte on the money map. In 1799 boy named Conrad Reed, playing in a creek twenty-five miles east of town, picked up a seventeen pound rock that glittered. His parents used it for a doorstop until a sharp-eyed merchant offered $3.50 cash. It was gold, the first ever discovered in North America.

Today’s Mint Museum of Art on Randolph Road incorporates the United States Mint constructed in 1837 to handle gold ore. Old mine shafts lurk beneath Uptown. Head out to the Reed Gold Mine state historic site near Albemarle to explore the Conrad Reed family’s actual mineshafts and pan for gold yourself.

Charlotte’s gold history is romantic but railroads actually did more for the economy.  In 1852, local investors in Charlotte and upstate South Carolina succeeded in completing the first rail line into the heart to the Carolinas. It connected Charlotte with Columbia, S.C, where existing track could take goods to the port of Charleston.  The North Carolina state legislature immediately authorized construction of a second line to link Charlotte with Raleigh. 

That railroad crossroads made tiny Charlotte a hotspot in the Civil War, 1861 – 1865. The Confederates manufactured cannon and ironwork for their ships here, and when Richmond fell in the last days of battle, Confederate President Jefferson Davis fled south along the rail lines, holding a last full meeting of his cabinet in a house on Tryon Street. 

New South reinventions

Though war’s hardships touched most families, Charlotte came out of the Civil War stronger than ever. Troops had cut the railroad to Columbia but it was quickly restored. African Americans, forty percent of Mecklenburg population, were now free. Charlotte population doubled during the 1860s, hitting 4,473 in 1870.

Leaders in Charlotte and across the post-war southland talked avidly of creating a New South. No longer would the region rely on slavery and farming. Like the North it would embrace factories and urbanization.  

That New South spirit of re-invention still defines Charlotte today.  No wonder the city is home to Levine Museum of the New South, whose nationally award-winning exhibitions show the region’s reinventions from fields to factories to finance, from slavery to segregation to Civil Rights.

By the 1880s Charlotte sat astride the Southern Railway mainline from Atlanta to Washington, DC, “main street of the South.” Farmers from miles around brought cotton to the railroad platform Uptown where the Epicenter (aptly named!) development is today. Local promoters began building textile factories, starting with the 1881 Charlotte Cotton Mill that still stands at Graham and Fifth streets.

By the 1920s this part of the Carolinas — from Greenville and Spartanburg in South Carolina to Winston Salem and Durham in North Carolina — surpassed New England to become the nation’s top cotton manufacturing district. Charlotte blossomed as the trading city for the region. Population zoomed from less than 20,000 at the turn of the century to over 100,000 by 1940.

You can see that history today in Charlotte’s NoDa (for North Davidson Street), a cluster of former mill villages reborn as an arts district. Or look further afield to the now-suburban towns of Pineville and Cornelius, Kannapolis and Belmont, Mount Holly and Gastonia. Big brick mill buildings, turned to fresh uses, brood like mother hens over rows of look-alike cottages.

Cotton’s legacy lies behind other landscapes as well. The glass-roofed 1915 Latta Arcade and adjoining Brevard Court in Uptown housed offices of cotton brokers. Myers Park, with its gracious greenways and curving oak-shaded streets by  renowned Boston landscape planner John Nolen, was laid out in the 1910s for mill owners, bankers and utility executives. Lake Wylie began as a hydroelectric project of James B. Duke, who sold power to textile companies.

Charlotte was never a one-industry town, however. Its central location made it the Carolinas’ sales and distribution hub for all kinds of goods. The Belk family built the South’s premier department store chain from headquarters in Charlotte. On Central Avenue, Leon Levine opened the first Family Dollar discount store, now nationwide.  Across the street, W.T. Harris operated a food market that blossomed into the regional grocer Harris Teeter. And in not far away in Wilkesboro, a hometown hardware store was growing into mega retailer Lowes Home Improvement.

New South prosperity aided educational opportunities. Dominating a hilltop west of Uptown stood the Victorian tower of Johnson C. Smith University, founded right after the Civil War to train African American “preachers and teachers.” In the midst of Myers Park nestled Queens College, also started by Presbyterians, which educated young white women. North of the city, elite Davidson College offered a liberal arts education to young white men. These specialized colleges were joined by what is now University of North Carolina at Charlotte, launched by Bonnie Cone in 1946, today serving over 28,000 students annually as one of North Carolina’s major research universities.

Colleges possessed no monopoly on culture. WBT radio, the first station licensed in the South, attracted a remarkable array of country music and gospel performers who sang live over the airwaves. RCA Victor and other record companies visited often. A South Tryon sidewalk plaque marks where Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass music, cut his first discs in 1936. Indeed during the late 1930s more records were made here than in Nashville.

The newest New South

Charlotte’s pace of re-invention began to accelerate in the late twentieth century.  This city that had been a backcountry farm hamlet before the Civil War, and a regional textile center in the early decades on the New South, now began to move onto the national stage.

The new era began with the Civil Rights movement. Charlotte black leaders succeeded in desegregating Revolution Park and the city’s new airport in the mid-1950s. In 1960, students at Johnson C. Smith University organized one of the largest sit-in efforts in the South, opening lunch counters to all.

But upscale restaurants still barred African Americans — until a remarkable series of events in May of 1963. Crusading dentist Dr. Reginald Hawkins led a march from JCSU to City Hall demanding total desegregation. Cities elsewhere in the South were meeting such requests with police dogs and firehoses. Mayor Stan Brookshire determined that Charlotte would be different. He phoned Chamber of Commerce leaders and quietly arranged for white-black pairs to eat lunch, integrating each restaurant. The action — a year before the 1964 Civil Rights Act required integration in all public places — won national notice.  

In an era when national businesses were looking to expand southward, a welcoming image paid dividends. Charlotte’s progressive reputation solidified when the city became the 1971 U.S. test case for court-ordered busing to integrate schools, and again in 1983 when Harvey Gantt won election as the first African American mayor of a major majority-white U.S. city. Between the early 1960s and early 1980s, Charlotte population grew more than fifty percent.

Banking became Charlotte’s next frontier of change. The city already had robust local banks thanks to a North Carolina law that allowed branches statewide. In 1982 banker Hugh McColl at NCNB figured out how to buy a small out-of-state bank. The innovation sparked a massive rewriting of banking laws across the nation. 

NCNB (rebranded as Nationsbank) and local rival First Union (later renamed Wachovia, then bought by San Francisco-based Wells Fargo) rode the crest of the interstate banking wave, rapidly building two of America’s largest financial institutions. In 1998 McColl purchased San Francisco’s venerable giant Bank of America and moved the headquarters to the Queen City, creating the United States’ first coast-to-coast bank. Charlotte suddenly ranked second only to New York as the nation’s biggest banking town.

As Charlotte broke into the ranks of top-20 U.S. cities, major league sports arrived. In 1988 the Charlotte Hornets brought pro basketball to a region known for its love of college hoops (especially North Carolina’s famed Duke – Chapel Hill rivalry).  Jerry Richardson, a former NFL player turned Hardees restaurant franchiser, put together financing to create the Carolina Panthers football team in 1993. Among his innovations: selling PSLs (Personal Seat Licenses) that guaranteed availability of season tickets. The Charlotte Knights minor league baseball team started the same year, moving to a handsome Uptown stadium in 2014.  

In auto racing, Charlotte had long been in the big league, ever since NASCAR ran its first-ever professional stock-car race at a county speedway in 1949. But now as the sport became increasingly sophisticated, the high-tech engineering operations of most race teams clustered near mammoth Charlotte Motor Speedway. In 2010 the NASCAR Hall of Fame opened in a glistening Uptown building designed by the firm of international architect I.M. Pei.

Between 1990 and 2015 county population doubled, surpassing one million residents. Governments in the city, county and outlying towns, still technically separate but all facing the same challenges of rapid urbanization, worked together to construct new hospitals, schools, roads, and Charlotte’s first modern-day light-rail transit lines.

While most newcomers arrived from elsewhere in the U.S., a growing number came from around the globe. That took many long-time Charlotteans by surprise; earlier immigration had largely bypassed this part of the South. A Brookings Institution report named Charlotte a Latino “hypergrowth” city in the 1990s, fourth in the United States. A subsequent study by Neilsen ranked Charlotte as the fastest growing major Latino metro in the entire U.S. during 2000 – 2013.

Latinos made up only about half of immigrants. Signs in Vietnamese, Arabic and Spanish dotted older suburban corridors including Central Avenue and South Boulevard where many newcomers launched businesses. Foreign-born families did not cluster in distinct neighborhoods, though, as in the Chinatowns and Little Italys of older U.S. immigrant destinations. At the edge of suburban Matthews, for instance, you could find Grand Asia Market, Lucy’s Colombian Bakery, Enzo’s Italian deli and a Mexican buffet in a single shopping center, with a Russian-Turkish grocery and a Greek pizza/Iranian kabob restaurant nearby.

Charlotte – past and future

At Independence Square in the heart of Uptown, four statues tower over Tryon and Trade streets. Each links Charlotte’s history with the present and future.  

 * An African American railroad worker stands for Transportation. That now includes rails, interstate highways and the nation’s sixth-busiest airport.

*  A woman and child in textile mill work-clothes represent Industry. Manufacturing and distribution account for a sizable part of today’s economy.

*  A gold miner symbolizes Commerce. Banking surely heads that category in present-day Charlotte.

* The fourth statue?  It is a mom holding a baby. The Future.

What does the future hold for Charlotte? The city faces very real challenges. How do we construct all the things needed by a fast-growing population? How do we ensure that the “rising tide lifts all boats,” as the old saying goes?  Indeed a recent Harvard study pointed to Charlotte as a place where it is unusually hard for children born at the bottom of the economic ladder to make it to the top. 

Perhaps most basically: how do we build community, a true sense of shared respect among the fast-growing array of natives and newcomers from every background?

As surely as when country families came off the farm to work in New South cotton mills … as surely as when Civil Rights activists and local officials worked together to open restaurants and schools to all … Charlotte can find ways to be a welcoming place for everyone.