Charlotte, North Carolina

Charlotte is the largest city in the state of North Carolina and the 20th largest city in the United States. It has a 2008 estimated population of approximately 695,995 as of January 1, 2008. It is the county seat of Mecklenburg County, and is located in the south-central part of the state in the Piedmont region, near the South Carolina border. The city's economy has and is continuing to mature starting in the 1990s and continuing through the 2000s to become dominated by financial services, as well as retail commerce. According to 2006 estimates, Charlotte is the 5th–fastest-growing among large U.S. cities as well as the fastest-growing city on the East Coast and the largest metro area between Atlanta and Washington, D.C.. A resident of Charlotte is referred to as a Charlottean.

Nicknamed The Queen City, Charlotte (as well as the county containing it) was named in honor of Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg, wife of King George III of the United Kingdom. During the American Revolution the British Commander in the Southern Colonies, General Cornwallis, occupied Charlotte but was driven out soon afterwards by the fierce opposition of the city's residents to British rule. Cornwallis famously wrote that Charlotte was "a hornet's nest of rebellion", leading to another city nickname: The Hornet's Nest.

As of 2006, the Charlotte metropolitan area had a population of 1,583,016. The Charlotte metropolitan area is part of a wider thirteen-county labor market region that has an estimated population (as of 2008) of 2,491,650.

History

The area that is now Charlotte was first settled in 1755 when Thomas Polk (uncle of United States President James K. Polk), who was traveling with Thomas Spratt and his family, stopped and built his house of residence at the intersection of two Native American trading paths between the Yadkin and Catawba rivers. One of the paths ran north-south and was part of the Great Wagon Road; the second path ran east-west along what is now modern-day Trade Street. In the early part of the 18th century, the Great Wagon Road led settlers of Scots-Irish and German descent from Pennsylvania into the Carolina foothills. Within the first decades following Polk's settling, the area grew to become the community of "Charlotte Town," which officially incorporated as a town in 1768. The crossroads, perched atop a long rise in the Piedmont landscape, became the heart of modern Uptown Charlotte.

In 1770, surveyors marked off the new town's streets in a grid pattern for future development. The east-west trading path became Trade Street, and the Great Wagon Road became Tryon Street, in honor of William Tryon, a royal governor of colonial North Carolina. The intersection of Trade and Tryon is known as "Trade & Tryon" or simply "The Square".

Both the town (now a city) and its county are named for Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the German-born wife of British King George III. The town name was chosen in hopes of winning favor with the crown, but tensions between the United Kingdom and Charlotte Town began to grow as King George imposed unpopular laws on the citizens in response to the townspeople's desire for independence. On May 20, 1775, the townsmen allegedly signed a proclamation later known as the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, a copy of which was sent, though never officially presented, to the Continental Congress a year later. The date of the declaration appears on the North Carolina state flag. Eleven days later, the same townsmen met to create and endorse the Mecklenburg Resolves, a set of laws to govern the newly independent town.

Charlotte was a site of encampment for both American and British armies during the Revolutionary War and, during a series of skirmishes between British troops and Charlotteans, the village earned the lasting nickname "Hornet's Nest" from frustrated Lord General Charles Cornwallis. An ideological hotbed of revolutionary sentiment during the Revolutionary War and for some time afterwards, the legacy endures today in the nomenclature of such landmarks as Independence Boulevard, Independence High School, Independence Center, Freedom Park, Freedom Drive, and the former NBA team Charlotte Hornets.

Churches, mainly of the Presbyterian faith, but also Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Catholics, began to form in the early 1800s, eventually giving Charlotte its nickname "The City of Churches."

In 1799, 12-year-old Conrad Reed brought home a rock weighing about 17 pounds, which the family used as a bulky doorstop for three years before it was recognized by a jeweler as near solid gold and bought for a paltry $3.50. The first verified gold find in the fledgling United States, young Reed's discovery became the genesis of the nation's first gold rush. Many veins of gold were found in the area throughout the 1800s and even into the early 1900s, thus the founding of the Charlotte Mint in 1837 for minting local gold. The state of North Carolina "led the nation in gold production until the California Gold Rush of 1848," although the total volume of gold mined in the Charlotte area was dwarfed by subsequent rushes. Charlotte's city population at the 1880 Census grew to 7,084. Some locally based groups still pan for gold occasionally in local (mostly rural) streams and creeks. The Reed Gold Mine operated until 1912. The Charlotte Mint was active until 1861, when Confederate forces seized the mint at the outbreak of the Civil War. The mint was not reopened at the end of the war, but the building survives today, albeit in a different location, now housing the Mint Museum of Art.

The city's modern-day banking industry achieved prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, largely under the leadership of financier Hugh McColl. McColl transformed North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) into a formidable national player that, through a series of aggressive acquisitions, eventually became Bank of America. Another bank, First Union, experienced similar growth, and is now known as Wachovia after a merger. Today, measured by control of assets, Charlotte is the second largest banking headquarters in the United States after New York City.