The house at 65 North Union Street in Concord was built in 1905 in the Queen Anne style, nearly 10,000 square feet with turrets and a cupola, and it belonged to J.W. Cannon, founder of the Cannon Manufacturing Company. By 1968 it had sat empty for years. A group of local parents who wanted to open a school asked Cannon’s son Charles if they could use it, and in 1969 Cabarrus Academy opened there with 75 students.
For this, Cannon School is that school, renamed in 1998 and now on a 65-acre campus on Poplar Tent Road with about 1,050 students. Its founding year is the most important fact about it, and there are two accounts of what that year meant.
It started in 1969
The school’s own history describes a committee of local parents, led in the search for a site by Jane Liles, who found enough interest to open a school and set their sights on the empty Cannon house. Wikipedia’s entry, citing the historians Adams and Covington, describes the school as founded as a segregation academy immediately following court rulings that mandated desegregation of North Carolina’s public schools. The school opened with 75 students, all white, and no cafeteria or gymnasium, at a tuition of $750, and its headmaster, Herman Butrick, said Black students would have been admitted but none had applied.
Both accounts describe the same year, the same house and the same students. Neither is a secret, and the school today publishes its history alongside a statement that diversity, belonging and engagement are essential to its community.
Cabarrus Academy graduated its first seniors in 1972, added kindergarten in 1976 and grew through the 1980s under headmaster Richard Snyder, who arrived in 1988. In 1994 it moved from downtown Concord to the Poplar Tent Road campus near the Mecklenburg county line, and in 1998 it took the Cannon name. The first class to graduate as Cannon School did so in 2002.
The 1994 move to Poplar Tent Road is the second founding in the school’s own telling. The downtown mansion had no cafeteria or gymnasium when the school opened, and a quarter century of growth had outrun it; the new 65-acre campus was built for a school of a thousand, and the 1998 name change to Cannon School, honoring the family that lent the house, marked the transition from Cabarrus Academy’s small-school identity to a regional one.
The people behind it
Matt Gossage became the sixth head of school in 2006 and led it for more than a decade, telling Charlotte Magazine the school’s focus was preparing students for an unpredictable world through flexible thinking, teamwork and problem solving, and that parents were drawn to small classes and a sense of community. Mike Drew is the head of school now. The school’s core values are courage, teamwork, respect, integrity, passion and kindness, and its motto is Go Beyond.
Enrollment has climbed from about 800 in 2012 to roughly 1,050 today, drawing families from Concord, Charlotte, the Lake Norman towns, Kannapolis and Salisbury. About a fifth of students receive financial aid, according to a nonprofit listing, and lower school students wear uniforms.
The 1969 founding story has a detail the school tells with pride: the parents who organized it did so without a building, and the Cannon family’s willingness to lend an empty mansion is why the school exists. The house at 65 North Union Street is still standing in downtown Concord, and the school’s history page carries a photograph of it beside the 1972 seniors, the first class to graduate as Cabarrus Academy.
What it is now
Cannon is a junior kindergarten through twelfth grade college preparatory school accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and the Southern Association of Independent Schools. Its campus holds about sixty classrooms, two media centers, science labs, art studios with a darkroom, a dance studio, two gymnasiums and a dining center, and it launched a football program in 2009. Upper school students receive laptops, each class takes a trip, and the school has run an exchange with a school in China and offers Mandarin.
The school describes itself as a place where students don’t need to fit in, because they belong, and its athletic teams, the Cougars, compete in the state independent schools association.
The Poplar Tent Road campus sits in the northwestern corner of Cabarrus County near the Mecklenburg line, which is why the school draws as heavily from Charlotte and the Lake Norman towns as from Concord itself. Bus service covers the region, and the school’s stated core values, courage, teamwork, respect, integrity, passion and kindness, are printed on its materials the way a motto would be. The head of school, Mike Drew, has framed the school’s mission as nurturing every relationship so that each learner finds a path to growth.
Why it matters
Three of the Charlotte region’s largest independent schools were founded in 1969 and 1970, in the years the courts desegregated the public schools, and each has a different relationship with that fact. Charlotte Latin says it opened integrated. Providence Day’s founders organized as an alternative to integration. Cannon’s origin is described one way by historians and another by the school, and a reader deserves both.
What is not in dispute is what the school became: a thousand students, a 65-acre campus and a stated commitment to belonging, half a century after 75 children walked into a textile baron’s empty mansion. The house on Union Street is still there. The school moved on, and says so.