The (abbreviated) story of Charlotte and its Roads
Before European settlers arrived, this region was inhabited by several different Native American tribes, notably the Catawba, along with the Cherokee and the Iroquois. Sugar (or Sugaw, as some spell it) Creek is actually a Catawban word that translates to "group of huts."[1] Charlotte's center is located at the junction of two trading paths, which formed the track for Trade and Tryon Streets in uptown. One of those paths would have run between Camden, SC, and points north in Virginia. These paths are the reason for the grid being oriented roughly parallel to Sugar and Irwin Creeks, rather than a north-south alignment.
Charlotte was founded in the 1760s by Thomas Polk, John Frohock, and Abraham Alexander, who purchased 360 acres of land from Lord Augustus Selwyn, upon which the heart of Charlotte sits.[2] Polk had a grid 400 feet on a side surveyed out on that plot to form the start of the town, named Charlottetown or Charlottesburg, in honor of Queen Charlotte. Mecklenburg is a reference to the German county in which she was born.
In the rest of the county, there were few planned townships. Settlers formed loose farming communities, whose center point was often a church. These settlers, being primarily Scots-Irish, brought Presbyterianism to the region.
They founded seven Presbyterian churches distributed around the county, all in the 1770–90 period, with Sugaw Creek Presbyterian being the mother church. Today, these churches are referred to as the Seven Sisters, and, along with later Presbyterian churches, influenced the routing of many roads, as people sought convenient routes to them. The locations of these seven are shown on the main map.
Providence Road, for example, is named for being the road that leads to Providence Presbyterian, located just south of Providence and Hwy 51. Similarly, Sharon is a common name in the SouthPark region, owing to Sharon Presbyterian, which was founded in the 1820s and formed a hub for the community.
One of the more well-known parts of our history is that we hold the title "First in Freedom." While there is some dispute over the existence of an actual declaration, it is a fact that Mecklenburg County was the first county to absolve itself of its allegiance to the British crown, in May 1775, in the wake of the events in Concord and Lexington.
British General Cornwallis brought his troops through Mecklenburg in September 1780, where William Davie and 150 patriots confronted him at Trade and Tryon. While greatly outnumbered, Davie instructed them “some earnest of what Lord Cornwallis might expect in North Carolina.”
While we lost the battle and control of the city, residents were spurred to resist by their sacrifice, and carried out guerrilla attacks on Cornwallis's men for several weeks. This, combined with news of the victory by the Patriots at Kings Mountain, spurred him to issue a full retreat out of the county.
He is later quoted as describing Mecklenburg County as "A hornets nest of rebellion".[3] This moniker sticks around today, and is where this project draws its name. The Charlotte Hornets is also a nod to this quote.
There was a gold rush in the region starting in 1803, particularly in Cabarrus County, where Reed's Gold Mine operated as the country's first gold mine. Several mines were also opened in the Charlotte area, especially where South End now sits.
This brought a branch of the U.S. Mint in 1837, which minted that gold (along with other metals) into currency. The original mint sat on Mint St. and Trade St. It was disassembled brick by brick and reassembled in its current location off Randolph Road in 1936, where it functions as an art museum.
The first time Charlotte was separately counted as an entity from the rest of the county was in 1850, and it was recorded as having only 1,065 residents within its limits, with 14,000 in the full county, which until 1850 had included Union County, and even earlier, Cabarrus, which was split off in 1800.
1855 marked the first expansion of its limits, which extended it to the grid's final size, bounded more or less by 12th Street, McDowell Street, Morehead Street, and Cedar Street.
The grid was surveyed out one last time, but many of the roads, even within the original survey's bounds that are around today, were still not on the ground. This is one of the largest challenges I have encountered.
There are many "ghost roads" that show up on maps of the time, that I have found no evidence ever existed. Notably, the grid that extended past current 277 near 12th Street. This map of Charlotte in 1877 shows what I mean
The 1830s–1850s also saw the addition of many railroads, as Charlotte is a great crossroads to connect Atlanta and the Deep South with the rest of the eastern seaboard.
There was a large railyard that sat where the convention center now is, until the 1950s.
The railroads, along with passionate industrialists such as D.A. Thompkins (who also wrote several histories of the county), brought cotton and textile processing to the city.
This marked the start of the boom of Charlotte that continues to this day. Industry popped up along the rail lines, bringing us the South End area, along with southern NoDa, which steadily expanded into the 1900s. We still only had a population of 11,000 in the city limits, and 42,000 in the rest.