A short history of Uptown

Uptown is the only downtown in America that insists on the name, and the reason is a ridge. Tryon Street runs along a low rise, so from any direction you approach Independence Square, at Trade and Tryon, you’re walking uphill (Charlotte’s Got A Lot). That crossroads is the whole city in one intersection, and this guide walks it: the trading paths, the town, the revolution, the gold, the railroad, the mills and the banks. Every date links to a source; the businesses that occupy the story today link to the directory.

The paths

Before there was a town there were two paths. Tryon Street follows the Nation’s Path, the trading route of the Catawba and other nations that ran from Georgia to the Chesapeake, the same line today’s I-85 follows; Trade Street was the east-west route (Google Arts & Culture, with the CRVA). Where they crossed, on the highest ground in the county, Thomas Polk built his house, and the town that grew around it was incorporated as Charlotte Town in 1768, named for Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III’s wife (Charlotte Center City Partners). Surveyors laid the grid in 1770. When William Moultrie passed through in 1772 he counted five or six log houses (Familypedia, citing period sources).

The declaration that may not exist

On May 31, 1775, Mecklenburg’s leaders adopted the Mecklenburg Resolves, declaring the authority of King and Parliament null and void, more than a year before Philadelphia. Tradition holds that a full Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence was signed eleven days earlier, on May 20, 1775, but no copy survives and it never appeared in any colonial paper (Charlotte’s Got A Lot). The May 20 date is on the state flag and the city celebrates it every year regardless; the square got its name from it. Our read: the Resolves are real and remarkable enough. Cornwallis occupied the town in 1780 and left calling it a hornet’s nest, which is why the hornet is on everything.

The gold

In 1799 a boy named Conrad Reed pulled a 17-pound glittering rock from a creek 25 miles east; his family used it as a doorstop until a merchant paid $3.50 for it. It was the first documented gold find in the country (Charlotte’s Got A Lot). Gold was found at Irwin Creek in 1825, near today’s West Morehead and Graham, and the Rudisill and St. Catherine mines still run 500 feet under Uptown and South End, from south of the stadium to the Bank of America tower (Charlotte Center City Partners). By 1837 the output justified the first branch of the U.S. Mint, built on Mint Street; California ended the boom after 1849 (Wikipedia). When the Mint building faced demolition in 1933, citizens had it dismantled and rebuilt on Randolph Road, where it opened as the Mint Museum in 1936, the state’s first art museum (Charlotte’s Got A Lot). The Mint Museum is in the directory; the Randolph Road building is the one to visit for this story.

The railroad and the mills

The railroad arrived in 1852 and turned a courthouse town into a regional trading center for bankers and cotton merchants (My City Magazine). The cotton trade of the late 1800s made Charlotte a rail distribution hub (Lavilo), and the mills followed: by the 1900s the county was among the South’s most important textile centers, with the mill villages that became NoDa, Dilworth’s Atherton and the Chadwick-Hoskins district ringing the center city (Dr. Thomas Hanchett, History South). Our mill village guide tells that part.

The banks

The skyline is the last chapter. A series of bank mergers in the late 1900s and early 2000s made Charlotte the second-largest banking center in the country behind New York (Lavilo), and the towers on Tryon are what the mergers bought. The old downtown of hotels and department stores came down to make room; our Lost Charlotte guide has the casualties. What was left of the old center city, the Fourth Ward Victorians and a few churches, was saved by the preservationists of the 1970s and the Historic Landmarks Commission, which has protected hundreds of properties since 1973 (Charlotte Urban Institute).

Walking it

Start at the Square, with the four bronze figures on the corners. Walk Tryon north past the towers to Fourth Ward’s restored houses. Walk south past the stadium to the Mint Street site, where the branch mint stood. Follow the urban greenway to the James Jack statue, the tavern-keeper who carried the 1775 papers to Philadelphia (Google Arts & Culture). Uptown Funk Tour does the whole thing guided. The Charlotte Museum of History, on its eight-acre campus with the county’s oldest house, is where the story starts; the Levine Museum of the New South, not yet in the directory, is where it continues. The historic markers guide lists the plaques along the way.

Why it matters now

Uptown has reinvented itself four times: courthouse town, gold town, mill town, bank town. The fifth reinvention, as a place people live, is underway; the towers on the north side are apartments and the parks have strollers. A city that has torn down most of its past is, for once, building on the same crossroads it started with. Charlotte Center City Partners keeps the calendar. Know a piece of the story we’ve missed? Tell us.