Mecklenburg County
The History of Charlotte, North Carolina
Charlotte has reinvented itself at least four times: a crossroads town named after a queen, the center of America’s first gold rush, a cotton and railroad hub, and then, very quickly, one of the largest banking cities in the United States.
The Queen City
Charlotte is named for Queen Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the German-born wife of George III. Mecklenburg County, established in 1762, takes its name from her ancestral duchy. That naming is where the Queen City comes from.
European settlement began around 1750 on land that was Catawba country. Charlotte received its town charter in 1768 and became the county seat. George Augustus Selwyn, a colonial proprietor, donated the land to encourage immigration, and the town was laid out at the crossing of Trade and Tryon streets — the point where the Great Trading Path met the road down from Tuckaseegee Ford on the Catawba, as described in the Catawba River before the dams.
May 1775: two documents
This needs care, because two different things are routinely run together.
The Mecklenburg Resolves are authentic and documented. They were adopted on May 31, 1775 at the county courthouse at Trade and Tryon. Thomas Polk led the committee and Ephraim Brevard was secretary. They denied Parliament’s authority, transferred power to the Provincial Congress then sitting at New Bern, declared anyone holding a Crown commission an enemy to his country, and ordered the militia to arm. They were published in full in the North Carolina Gazette on June 16, 1775. Governor Josiah Martin called them worse than all the horrid and treasonable publications on the continent. NCpedia states plainly that their authenticity is not in question.
The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is disputed. The claim is that on May 20, 1775 — eleven days earlier and more than a year before the national Declaration — county residents declared themselves free and independent. No original exists. The text first appeared in 1819, forty-four years later, in the Raleigh Register. The original was said to have burned in a fire at John McKnitt Alexander’s house in 1800 and to have been reconstructed from memory. Thomas Jefferson dismissed it as spurious in a letter to John Adams. William Henry Hoyt argued in 1907 that it was a misremembering of the genuine May 31 Resolves.
Defenders point to real evidence: affidavits from a dozen witnesses including General Joseph Graham and Governor Montford Stokes, collected in an 1831 report to the General Assembly; a Moravian journal entry by Traugott Bagge from 1783; and an 1801 toast in the Raleigh Register calling Mecklenburg first in its declaration of independence, well before the 1819 publication. The weight of modern scholarship is against authenticity. May 20, 1775 is nonetheless on the state flag and the state seal, and shows no sign of coming off.
Gold
In 1799 Conrad Reed, son of John Reed, found a large yellow rock in Little Meadow Creek on the family farm in Cabarrus County, next door to Mecklenburg. It reportedly weighed seventeen pounds and served as a doorstop for three years. In 1802 a Fayetteville jeweler identified it as gold and bought it for $3.50. John Reed formed a mining partnership the following year. An enslaved boy named Peter later found a 28-pound nugget, the largest documented in the United States.
Underground mining began at Reed in 1831. North Carolina led the nation in gold production until 1848, when California took over. Mecklenburg County had the largest number of gold mines in the state, and by 1837 more than fifty were operating in the Charlotte region.
The Mint
So much gold came out of the region that the federal government put a branch mint here. Construction began in 1835 and the Charlotte Mint opened on West Trade Street on December 4, 1837. Before the Civil War it struck more than $5 million in gold coin in one, two-and-a-half and five dollar denominations. During the war it became a Confederate hospital and command center, and it later ran as a US assay office until 1913.
When post office expansion threatened the building in the 1930s, Mary Myers Dwelle led the effort to save it. It was taken down piece by piece in 1933, moved east, and rebuilt between 1934 and 1936 with federal relief labor. It reopened in 1936 as the Mint Museum of Art, North Carolina’s first public art museum.
Railroads and cotton
The Charlotte and South Carolina Railroad reached the town from Columbia in 1852. The North Carolina Railroad, chartered in 1849 and finished in 1856, ran 223 miles from Goldsboro through Raleigh, Greensboro and Salisbury, with Charlotte as its southern terminus. The Atlantic, Tennessee and Ohio line to Statesville followed in 1860. By 1913 eight railroads converged here.
The first successful cotton mill in the city was the Charlotte Cotton Mill of 1880, built by R. M. and D. W. Oates with about 6,240 spindles and seventy workers. Alpha, Ada and Victor mills opened in 1889 and Atherton in 1893. D. A. Tompkins was the central figure: over twenty years his firm designed and built all or part of 250 cotton oil mills and more than a hundred cotton mills. Charlotte’s role was less to be the biggest mill town than to be the machinery, supply and finance center for everyone else’s mills — including those at Gastonia and Mooresville.
How the banks happened
Financing cotton became financing everything. Commercial National Bank was established in 1874 with $50,000 in equity, and a founding wave followed after 1893: Charlotte National Bank in 1897, Southern States Trust in 1901, Union National in 1908.
American Trust and Commercial National merged in 1957. Union National became First Union in 1958. In 1960 American Commercial merged with Security National of Greensboro to create North Carolina National Bank with $500 million in assets. NCNB passed Wachovia as the state’s largest bank in 1973 and held a fifth of the retail market by 1976.
In 1982 NCNB got around interstate banking restrictions through a Florida trust company loophole, and in 1985 the legislature passed the Southeastern Regional Banking Compact. Hugh McColl became chief executive in 1983 and drove the expansion; by 1987 NCNB was the largest bank in the Southeast. It bought First Republic of Texas in 1989, merged with C&S/Sovran in 1992 to form NationsBank, and in 1998 merged with BankAmerica of San Francisco to create Bank of America, then the largest bank in the country, headquartered here. First Union bought Wachovia in 2001 and took its name, keeping Charlotte as the base.
That is why a county that was farmland in 1762 now has a skyline. For families, the practical legacy is a court system handling one of the largest caseloads in the state, described in Mecklenburg County family court.
Charlotte by the census
Charlotte was a courthouse village of about a thousand people when the gold came in. The curve since then is the shortest way to tell the rest of the story.
| Year | Charlotte |
|---|---|
| 1850 | 1,065 |
| 1870 | 4,473 |
| 1890 | 11,557 |
| 1910 | 34,014 |
| 1930 | 82,675 |
| 1980 | 315,474 |
| 1990 | 395,934 |
| 2000 | 540,167 |
| 2010 | 734,873 |
| 2020 | 874,579 |
| 2025 (estimate) | 964,784 |
The 2020 figure here is the Census Bureau’s April 1 decennial count. One state encyclopedia gives 876,694 for the same year; the difference is unexplained, and the Census figure is the one used. Two further cautions: the “hornet’s nest” line is traditionally attributed to Cornwallis but does not appear in any contemporary document of his that could be located, and Charlotte’s rank as the second-largest financial center in the country is a widely repeated claim whose methodology is not specified and which has been contested in recent years. Both belong in the story, attributed rather than asserted.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Charlotte named after?
Queen Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of George III. Mecklenburg County is named for her ancestral duchy.
Is the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence real?
It is disputed. No original survives, the text first appeared in 1819, and most historians regard it as a misremembering of the authentic Mecklenburg Resolves of May 31, 1775. The May 20 date is nonetheless on the state flag and seal.
Where was America’s first gold rush?
North Carolina. Gold was found at the Reed farm in Cabarrus County in 1799, and the state led national gold production until the California rush of 1848.
What happened to the Charlotte Mint?
It opened in 1837, served as a Confederate hospital during the war, ran as an assay office until 1913, and was moved and rebuilt in the 1930s as the Mint Museum of Art.
Why is Charlotte a banking city?
A chain of mergers running from Commercial National Bank in 1874 through NCNB, NationsBank and the 1998 BankAmerica merger that created Bank of America, headquartered in Charlotte.
Sources for this article
Mecklenburg cases, without the downtown markup
Adkins Law appears in Mecklenburg County family court regularly, from an office in Huntersville rather than an uptown tower.
Adkins Law, PLLC · 9620 Sherrill Estates Road, Huntersville, NC 28078
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This article is local history, offered for general interest. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship. Historical accounts are drawn from the sources listed above; where sources disagree, that is noted in the text. For advice about your own situation, speak with a licensed North Carolina attorney.