Early Settlement:
The first Europeans to stake a claim in the area arrived in 1753. The location of this settlement was largely an accident. Whereas most major inland towns of the era grew where waterfalls hindered river navigation, or at the mouths of mountain passes, or where some natural resource waited to be exploited, Charlotte had none of these features. It was merely a place where two Indian trails crossed in the midst of an area of good farmland.
A spur off one of these trails connected to the Great Wagon Road. The Great Wagon Road was essentially a colonial highway, stretching from Pennsylvania, down through the Shenandoah Valley, and all the way to North Carolina. Because of this, a majority of Charlotte’s earliest settlers were Scotch-Irish. This trail eventually became Tryon Street, named after Colonial governor William Tryon. The other historic trail was part of a route that took traders northwest, from the port of Charleston all the way up to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Over the years, a great multitude of English, Swiss, Scotch, and Germans followed this route, and the trail eventually became known as Trade Street.
Economic Foundations:
The United States first ‘gold rush’ occurred near Charlotte, in 1802. As discoveries spread to nearby counties in North and South Carolina, Charlotte became the trading center of America’s first gold production region. By 1835 production was so heavy that the U. S. Treasury decided to open a branch mint in Charlotte. Between 1838 and 1861 the Charlotte mint coined more than $5 million in gold pieces. The Charlotte gold rush brought miners, engineers and metallurgists to the city, and is credited with the establishment of banks in the city. More than any other event, however, the 1852 arrival of the railroad set Charlotte on its way to being the largest city in North Carolina. When the Charlotte and South Carolina completed its track up from Columbia in that year, it was one of the first railways in the western half of North Carolina. In 1854, the State of North Carolina began work on a railroad from Raleigh and Goldsboro to Charlotte, in part to connect the eastern cities with the railroad to Columbia. This North Carolina Railroad, passing through Greensboro and Salisbury, cemented Charlotte’s status as an important railroad junction. Charlotte’s importance only increased with the addition of two more lines in the next seven years. In 1860, a railroad company grandly known as the Atlantic, Tennessee, and Ohio began running trains out of the city. In 1861 the first leg of the Wilmington, Charlotte and Rutherford Railroad connected Charlotte and Lincolnton, North Carolina. With four railroads now converging on the city, Charlotte had become an excellent location for trade and industry.
By the eve of the 1860s, Charlotte had grown from a village to a town. The American Civil War proved to be an economic boost for the city, as Charlotte became a center of wartime industry. Mecklenburg Iron Works, the town’s major industry on the eve of the war, cast Confederate cannon. Other factories produced gunpowder, chemicals, woolen goods, etc. Citizens of Charlotte recognized how much their relative good fortune depended on being a railroad hub and center of commercial exchange, and they used proceeds from their postwar prosperity to build new rail lines. In 1872 the city added its fifth railroad, the Carolina Central, which connected Charlotte directly with the port of Wilmington. The movement for a “New South” gained momentum in the Reconstruction Era. Charlotte began cultivating a manufacturing base in textiles, as well as diversifying into other fields. It was becoming increasingly urban, with one-fourth of North Carolina residents living what were now unquestionably cities. In contrast to the antebellum period, the South now wanted cities and eagerly financed such urban symbols as suburbs and skyscrapers, even in places which really had, as Charlotte journalist W. J. Cash observed, “little more use for them than a hog has for a morning coat.” By 1889, the city directory listed four cotton mills, six industrial machinery sellers(led by the long-established Mecklenburg Iron Works and the new Liddell foundry), three clothing factories, two cotton ginners, one cotton oil mill, and a manufacturer of cotton bagging and ties. With all this industrial development, the town of Charlotte grew into a small city.
In parallel with Charlotte’s industrial growth, Edward Dilworth Latta was a leading force in the town’s physical transformation into a city. In 1890 he joined with five associates to form the Charlotte Consolidated Construction Company, known as the Four Cs. This company became the prime agent in Charlotte’s urban development in the early twentieth century. Horse-drawn streetcars began running down the center of Trade street and Tryon street in 1887. In 1890, the Four Cs bought the franchise and, under the personal direction of Thomas Edison, completely rebuilt it as an electric trolley car line. Electric cars started operation on two lines on May 18th, 1891. One followed its overhead wire the length of Trade Street, from McDowell Street on one edge of town to the railroad station on West Trade on the other. At the Square it crossed the second track, which ran along a stretch of Tryon Street covering the Carolina Central Station at Twelfth street, all the way out South Tryon. But there, the cars did not stop at the edge of the city. They kept right on going out into the farmland where the Four Cs were developing Dilworth. By the early 1890s, Charlotte was a little city with big-city ambitions.
Modernizing Forces:
Though cotton and textiles remained a mainstay during this period, the city also attracted non-textile industries. Charlotte Pipe and Foundry, established in 1900, and Cole Manufacturing, founded the same year, still produce iron pipe and agricultural equipment, respectively. In 1913, salesman Philip L. Lance began roasting peanuts and selling peanut butter crackers, a novel idea that has grown into one of the nation’s largest snack food companies. Since the discovery of gold, and the establishment of a Mint branch, banks have played a vital role in the growth of Charlotte. They provided capital for new development, not only in Charlotte, but increasingly for the entire Piedmont. Charlotte National Bank, founded in 1897, grew by mergers to become part of the Wachovia Bank and Trust Company. Southern States Trust, founded in 1901 by real estate developers F. C. Abbott, George Stephens and Word Wood, is the basis for today’s mammoth NCNB Corporation. The contemporary First Union began in 1908, as Union National Bank. In this period, Charlotte’s most successful capitalists moved easily from mill ownership, to banking, to real estate development, and back again.
These years of plenty saw a shift from steam engines to electric power, a shift that furthered Charlotte’s position as center industry in the Piedmont. James B. Duke was an extremely wealthy North Carolina native who built the immense American Tobacco Company headquartered in New York at the turn of the century. In 1897, Duke began buying water power sites along the Catawba River, convinced that the opportunity for many dams along its gentle drop would make it an important producer of hydroelectric power. Southern Power Company began delivering electricity to customers in 1904. Duke also added the city’s seventh rail line. His Piedmont and Northern Railway was an electric inter-urban line ,which ran from Charlotte to Gastonia, beginning in 1911. It symbolized Charlotte’s power over surrounding smaller cities, whose residents would regularly ride the inter-urban or one of the other railroads into the big city to shop and do other business. Charlotte’s final new railroad came to town in 1913. The Norfolk and Southern track came from Virginia, via Albemarle and Raleigh. By the height of these New South boom years, Charlotte was the hub for rail lines stretching in eight directions.
With this booming economic growth came tremendous physical expansion. Between 1900 and 1910, the city grew from 18,091 people to approximately 34,014 people, an 82 percent increase, larger than any other decade in this century. A band of suburbs sprang up completely ringing the city. Downtown, the commercial core expanded upward and outward, symbolically capped by the completion in 1909 of the Independence Building (originally Realty Building) on Independence Square, the first steel-frame skyscraper in either North or South Carolina. Dilworth prospered, and dozens of new subdivisions were created in these years, completing the city’s first suburban ring. More research is needed in county plat records before they can all be identified. Many have passed from memory, absorbed in larger neighborhoods. Western Heights, north of West Trade Street below what is now Johnson C. Smith University, was originally settled by whites. In 1913 an important event took place further out Beatties Ford Road. A second “colored suburb” called Douglassville was platted along Oaklawn Avenue on the other side of Beatties Ford Road shortly thereafter, today part of the area known as McCrorey. Not all of the era’s leaders were as thoughtful in their adoption of big city ideas. At the same time that Myers Park and Dilworth were being landscaped, downtown was stripped of its trees. Tryon Street was to be lined with electric lights and become “The Great White Way,” a small-time imitation of New York City’s Broadway.
Charlotte’s rate of expansion dropped somewhat in the late teens when U. S. entry into World War I put a stop to most civilian construction. By that time, however, Charlotte was clearly a city. It was headquarters of a large textile region, with a diversified economic base including banking, power generation and wholesaling. A bustling mass transit system, the backbone of big-city growth, now served an expanding ring of suburbs. In the 1910 census Charlotte pulled far ahead of Raleigh in population and finally overtook the port of Wilmington to become North Carolina’s largest city, symbolizing the shift in the state’s economy from cotton and tobacco export to textile production.
The Third Boom, The Roaring Twenties:
Nationwide, the World War I lull in construction continued through a mild postwar depression that lasted until the early 1920s. Beginning about 1923, the city underwent a period of tremendous growth which lasted until the Great Depression. Large sections of present-day Charlotte date from this period of prosperity. The 1920s, unlike the city’s two earlier booms, seem to have been a period of consolidating previous gains rather than setting new directions. By the twenties the first generation of New South leaders was either dead or ready to pass their power on to younger decision makers. In the hands of their successors, economic development, urban growth, and even architecture followed increasingly conservative patterns. The city continued to develop as a distribution center. By 1920 more than 700 traveling salesmen lived here, a large percentage of the workforce. They sold not only textile related products but an increasingly diverse array of goods. The Ford Motor Company made Charlotte a distribution point for repair parts for the South in the early teens, and by 1915 was shipping parts in quantity for Charlotte laborers to assemble into complete automobiles. In 1925 Ford opened a vast new assembly line plant on Statesville Road that turned out 300 Model Ts per day for the Southern market. In the 1920s the Victor Corporation, later RCA Victor, chose Charlotte as a regional distribution center for its radios, phonographs, and records. When the company began to send field teams south to record phonograph records, Charlotte’s Victor operation became a major recording center.
Vital to Charlotte’s growth as a distribution center was the network of paved highways that began to converge on the city in the 1920s. They were the result of North Carolina’s “Good Roads” program initiated in 1921 by Governor Cameron Morrison who was, not coincidentally, a Charlotte resident. The new highways helped the city to continue to grow as a wholesaling point, and also to develop as a trucking center for the whole southeastern United States. New bank buildings sprung up, from the towering First National to the delicate three-story Greek temple built for the Industrial Loan and Investment Bank on Church Street. The biggest news in banking was the opening of a branch of the Federal Reserve in 1927. This new facility maintained the cash reserves of the region’s banks, made cash loans to them, moved currency and coins in and out of circulation, and provided swift inter-bank check clearing, and it gave Charlotte a new financial edge on other cities in the area.
In 1928 the city boundaries expanded to encompass a total of nearly twenty square miles. Suburbs continued to grow, but became increasingly segregated by economic class and race. Developments of the 1890s-1910s had usually combined a grand boulevard of wealthy homes with side streets for the middle class. Piedmont Park, for instance, had fine Central Avenue and modest Jackson Avenue, and the Olmsteds’ Dilworth had both impressive Dilworth Road and homey Sarah Marks. Even Myers Park had Dartmouth Road bungalows along with its Hermitage Road and Queens Road mansions. The 1920s suburbs, by contrast, were all of a piece. Only middle class people lived in Roslyn Heights off Rozells Ferry Road, created in 1923-25. Only the city’s wealthiest lived in Eastover, built off Providence Road under the direction of landscape architect Earle Sumner Draper during the 1920s. Even the style of the homes became conservative. By the late 1920s, the Colonial Revival was adopted as the de facto architectural motif, with Tudor Revival variations being the only alternative. While this was part of a nationwide return to historical motifs in architecture, it seems to have been particularly rigid in Charlotte. Endless blocks of Myers Park, Eastover, and the new streets of Dilworth were developed in the 1920s with variations on the two-story brick Colonial box. By the end of the 1920s, some 82,675 people lived in Charlotte. This represents almost a 78% increase in just ten years. Charlotte pulled ahead of Charleston, to become the largest in both either Carolina, and the Piedmont textile manufacturing region had clearly triumphed over the old coastal agricultural export region.
To The Present:
The stock market crash of 1929 triggered the United States’ greatest depression. In Charlotte the rate of growth fell sharply as it did elsewhere across the nation. But, perhaps due to the diversity of the local economy, growth did not stop altogether as it did in many U. S. cities. Though the number of building permits issued fell, streets of new houses continued to spring up even in the early 30s, at the depth of the Depression.
By 1948 the country was ready to build again, and an unprecedented boom occurred. The returning G.Is, ready for homes of their own, were aided by the new Veterans Administration mortgage program and the recently established Federal Housing Administration loan guarantee program. With these, any white family could afford a house. Beginning in 1948 a whole new ring of suburbs sprang up around Charlotte. As before, these included middle class areas, like Maryland and Sterling streets at the edge of Myers Park. Now, however, there were also blue-collar suburbs, such as Smallwood Homes out West Trade Street. After the initial postwar boom came a brief lull in the early fifties, then steady growth into the 1960s. Some of present-day Charlotte still dates from this postwar era.
Starting with Independence Boulevard, in 1946, a network of expressways and widened thoroughfares cut through the city. They sped commuters to distant new suburban tracts and also, to the surprise of their proponents, encouraged businesses to leave downtown for new sites in the cheap farmland at the edge of the city. When the U. S. began its Interstate Highway program Charlotte became a center in this new net also. The first local leg of east-west I-85 opened in 1958, eventually linking the city with Atlanta, Durham, and Richmond. In 1965, construction began on north-south I-77 through the city, a link to Columbia, and the Midwest. These new Interstates reinforced Charlotte’s position as the Piedmont’s premier distribution center, particularly for trucking. According to some observers, only Chicago is home base to more tractor trailer rigs today than Charlotte.
The rise of trucking is one of three major changes in Charlotte’s economy since the 1920s. The second is the declining importance of textiles. Textile production still dominates the region around the city, but in Charlotte itself all of the mills that hummed sixty years ago are now silent. With the decline of textile activity has come the growth of banking. It is almost as if the descendants of the textile entrepreneurs gradually purified their trading activities to the point that the cotton disappeared, leaving a trade purely in money. Charlotte has become a major financial center. Deposits held by banks operating in Mecklenburg exceed that for any comparable area between Philadelphia and Dallas, and bank offices dominate the Charlotte skyline.
Sources:
North Carolina History Project:
http://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/mecklenburg-county-1762/
Charlotte Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission:
http://www.cmhpf.org/educhargrowth.htm
Vision for Charlotte 