I need to start out by saying that the Charlotte Museum of History is a local treasure. It's a wonderful place to spend a few hours: exploring the museum, seeing the preserved colonial house, or just wandering the small network of wooded paths. But I out there looking for the story of the city of Charlotte, and, for the most part, I had to tease it out of smaller details.
Driving up the museum feels like finding an oasis. The beautiful flowers and fountain welcome you to the grounds, and the grounds are wooded enough that the parking lot seems to be way out in a forest, even though you can still see Shamrock Drive. It's a peaceful place. You walk into the atrium and pay your six dollars for an adult ticket, and you're off to the exhibits.Off to the right, there are two rooms, one dedicated to the founding of Charlotte and another to its growth. The Eighteenth Century room has a model of what the Trade and Tryon intersection looked like in the late 1700s — two dirt roads and a small group of houses and cabins. You'll find the story of how Thomas Polk got Charlotte to be named the seat of Mecklenburg County, and where our local emphasis on hornets came from. The other room is for the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, with a nice display for the gold rush of the 1830s and cases full of artifacts from America's wars.
Between these two rooms, you've covered the broad outline of American History. Colonial times, American revolution, agriculture, gold rush, slavery, Civil War, reconstruction and industry, World War I, World War II. And I can see how this is probably the best way to draw people into Charlotte's history. But it doesn't seem like Charlotte's own story. If you want to figure out how Charlotte became the most populous city in North Carolina, you have to read between the lines.
For example, one placard showed that before the Civil War, almost a third of Mecklenburg County's population was enslaved. It also says that about 6,000 African-Americans were emancipated after the war. If I'm thinking about this correctly, that puts the population of Mecklenburg County at about 18,000 people. Which is to say: not that many, compared to now. In fact, Charlotte's population boom didn't start until the early 1900s, when a streetcar network and a “Watch Charlotte Grow” campaign created a ring of suburbs and an industry boom. There is basically one panel on this growth in the downstairs rooms, although elsewhere there is a map that shows the sequence of Charlotte's annexations over time. What's rather startling is that in 1899, the city limits were roughly where the inner beltway is now. It was in the decade that followed that Charlotte's population eclipsed that of Wilmington, which was to that point North Carolina's largest city. All of which reinforces my hunch that Charlotte wasn't very important prior to the last few decades of the 1800s, and makes me wonder what advantages Charlotte had over other cities. One of the clues to Charlotte's rise can be found in the railroad maps, which shows Charlotte at the intersection of the line running from Wilmington to the mountains and the line running from Raleigh down to Columbia, South Carolina.
While I felt the two permanent rooms were trying to tell America's story through Charlotte's eyes, one of the upstairs exhibits told a particular Charlotte story more along the lines of what I was looking for. North Charlotte was a company town that was built in Charlotte's crucial decades of early growth, and for a time functioned as a self-contained mill community. The neighborhood weathered the Great Depression only to decline when the mills closed after the second World War. North Charlotte languished under high crime rates until a group of new artists and old locals restyled the area as NoDa, or North Davidson. It was an excellent display, evoking the lost world of Piedmont mill towns, despite a somewhat goofy use of the same photograph of one mill in full color to illustrate good times and menacingly grayed out to represent bad times.
Another room downstairs was devoted to the photographs of Margaret Morley, a writer and biologist who moved to the North Carolina mountains and distilled a decade of observation into her 1913 book The Carolina Mountains. The photographs and captions are beautiful, and it's worth six dollars just for that if you love the Blue Ridge as much as I do.
Out behind the museum, you find the Hezekiah Alexander house. This carefully restored building dates to colonial times. I didn't have time to take the tour, so I won't say much about it except that it's really nice to walk around to the herb garden, and to see the old trees in the yard. The woods are tranquil and verdant, and worth stopping in. Wander too far, and you'll end up on the grounds of a Methodist retirement community called Aldersgate.
I realize that it's a bit unreasonable for me to walk into a museum demanding a particular narrative, especially when there's a whole other museum dedicated to the rise of Charlotte as a New South City. And the Charlotte Museum of History recommends some interesting books in its display and has a great website. But I was surprised that the question “Why did Charlotte grow?” wasn't addressed more explicitly, as it's perhaps the crucial question for rooting our aspirations to world-class status in our own history.Still, don't let any of this stop you from visiting. They're doing good work over there.
