The History of Charlotte
The area that is now Charlotte was first settled in 1755 when Thomas Polk (uncle of U.S. President James K. Polk), who was traveling with Thomas Spratt and his family, stopped and built his house of residence at the intersection of two Native American trading paths between the Yadkin and Catawba rivers. One of the paths ran north-south and was part of the Great Wagon Road; the second path ran east-west along what is now modern-day Trade Street. In the early part of the 18th century, the Great Wagon Road led settlers of Scots-Irish and German descent from Pennsylvania into the Carolina foothills. Within the first decades following Polk's settling, the area grew to become the community of "Charlotte Town," which officially incorporated as a town in 1768. The crossroads, perched atop a long rise in the Piedmont landscape, became the heart of modern Uptown Charlotte.
In 1770, surveyors marked off the new town's streets in a grid pattern for future development. The east-west trading path became Trade Street, and the Great Wagon Road became Tryon Street, in honor ofWilliam Tryon, a royal governor of colonial North Carolina. The intersection of Trade and Tryon is known as "Trade & Tryon" or simply "The Square".
Both the city and its county are named for Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the German-born wife of British King George III. The town name was chosen in hopes of winning favor with the crown, but tensions between the United Kingdom and Charlotte Town began to grow as King George imposed unpopular laws on the citizens in response to the townspeople's desire for independence. On May 20, 1775, the townsmen allegedly signed a proclamation later known as the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, a copy of which was sent, though never officially presented, to the Continental Congress a year later.The date of the declaration appears on the North Carolina State Flag. Eleven days later, the same townsmen met to create and endorse the Mecklenburg Resolves, a set of laws to govern the newly independent town.
Charlotte was a site of encampment for both American and British armies during the Revolutionary War and, during a series of skirmishes between British troops and Charlotteans, the village earnedthe lasting nickname "Hornet's Nest" from frustrated Lord General Charles Cornwallis. An ideological hotbed of revolutionary sentiment during the Revolutionary War and for some time afterwards, thelegacy endures today in the nomenclature of such landmarks as Independence Boulevard, Independence High School, Independence Center, Freedom Park, Freedom Drive, and the former NBA team Charlotte Hornets. Churches, mainly of the Presbyterian faith, but also Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Catholics, began to form in the early 1800s, eventually giving Charlotte its nickname "The City ofChurches."
In 1799, 12-year-old Conrad Reed brought home a rock weighing about 17 pounds, which the family used as a bulky doorstop for three years before it was recognized by a jeweler as near solid gold and bought for a paltry $3.50. The first verified gold find in the fledgling United States, young Reed's discovery became the genesis of the nation's first gold rush. Many veins of gold were found in the area throughout the 1800s and even into the early 1900s, thus the founding of the Charlotte Mint in 1837 for minting local gold. The state of North Carolina "led the nation in gold production until the California Gold Rush of 1848," although the total volume of gold mined in the Charlotte area was dwarfed by subsequent rushes. Charlotte's city population at the1880 Census grew to 7,084. The Reed Gold Mine operated until 1912. The Charlotte Mint was active until 1861, when Confederate forces seized the mint at the outbreak of the Civil War. The mint was not reopened at the end of the war, but the building survives today, albeit in a different location, now housing the Mint Museum of Art.
The city's first boom came after the Civil War, as a cotton processing center and a railroad hub. Population leapt again during World War I, when the U.S. government established Camp Greene north of present-day Wilkinson Boulevard. Many soldiers and suppliers stayed after the war, launching an ascent that eventually overtook older and more established rivals along the arc of the Carolina Piedmont.
The city's modern-day banking industry achieved prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, largely under the leadership of financier Hugh McColl. McColl transformed North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) into a formidable national player that, through a series of aggressive acquisitions, eventually became Bank of America. Another bank, First Union, experienced similar growth, and is now known as Wachovia after a merger. Today, measured by control of assets, Charlotte is the second largest banking headquarters in the United States after New York City.
