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| UNC Charlotte design student presents plans imagining a transit-oriented neighborhood, North Park. Photo: Mary Newsom |
It was 250 years ago this week, Dec. 3, 1768, that the City
of Charlotte was officially born with an act by the royal governor of the
colony of North Carolina. (Read that charter here.) Monday, the city celebrated in a ceremony uptown with
a sound stage and music so extremely amplified that you couldn’t talk to
anyone, with birthday cake and food trucks.
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| Jim Williams as Thomas Polk |
It wasn’t a fancy, planned-for-two-years kind of celebration
– no fireworks, parades with visiting dignitaries, planes flying banners
overhead. But of course, officialdom in Charlotte for as long as I’ve lived
here has been more interested in pushing future growth and prosperity than in examining
and learning from the past.
That 1768 charter designated five white men to be “city
directors,” and one of them, Thomas Polk, was loitering near the sound stage Monday,
waiting for the noon speechifying. Polk, or really, local history enthusiast
Jim Williams, was resplendent in a black tricorne hat, buff-colored waistcoat,
and knee breeches and frock coat of the color that 200 years later would be known
as Carolina Blue. Polk – the real one – was a shrewd fellow of Scots-Irish ancestry who before eventually moving on to Tennessee played a key role in the city’s first – but by no means last – spec development.
Polk and a few others, on their own dime, built a log
courthouse where two trading paths intersected, in hopes of giving the young
town a competitive edge to be designated the Mecklenburg County seat. Which would,
of course, make their own property more valuable.
It worked.
And for a city on the make, what could be a more fitting
foundational story?
WE MOVE FROM 1768 TO ... SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE
