Category: Charlotte history

Anti-vaxxers. Boosterism beating science. Sound familiar?

Charlotte’s first zoning map from 1947 shows development patterns that continue today almost 75 years later. Hanchett’s book, with a new preface, describes how government actions like zoning shaped today’s racial and economic segregation. Today’s wealthiest area of south and southeast Charlotte appears here in green at the lower right corner, because the map is not oriented north-south.

“Today’s decisions, consciously or unconsciously, rest on the platform of the past.” 
–– Tom Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975, second edition

People who find history boring and irrelevant must have scars from repeatedly touching hot stoves. The past has lessons, if we’ll listen. This is about a couple of century-old events in my city, Charlotte.

My original plan here was to write about the second edition of historian Tom Hanchett’s Sorting out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975. It’s a stunning book, one I regularly recommend when people ask what to read to learn about Charlotte. When I first read it in 1998, it was like having a light flick on in a darkened room; you see things you previously sensed only in shadowy outlines.

The meticulously researched look into how Charlotte’s neighborhoods went from racially diverse after the Civil War to strictly segregated told a story new to many of us – not the fact of segregation but how it happened across decades. He described how government – local, state and federal – was a key actor in creating and enforcing racial segregation. (To learn more about government’s role in U.S. housing segregation, see Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.)

Hanchett, the retired historian for the Levine Museum of the New South, today is historian-in-residence at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. His powerful new preface brings his work up to date and makes the point that since current inequities of wealth, well-being and education resulted from deliberate government action, then government action can help reverse them.

But … pandemic. Most Americans are now stuck at home, trying to stay 6 feet from anyone outside, many having lost jobs. We’re all viewing the world through a coronavirus lens and living through a history-making pandemic, the most serious since the 1918-19 flu, estimated to have killed at least 40 million people globally.

These days some politicians urge reopening stores and businesses, and not a few Americans agree, saying the cost to the
economy is so cruel it counterbalances the obvious cost in suffering and death. Many states are re-opening, some more speedily and others, like North Carolina, more gradually.

So here is history caution No. 1: A remarkable Charlotte Observer article in April – “The Big Lie: 102 years ago Charlotte leaders downplayed devastation of Spanish flu” – offered a powerful look at government deceit, medical advice ignored, and the resulting death toll. Reporter Mark Washburn studied death certificates, obituary reports and local newspapers. He found that Charlotte Mayor Frank McNinch and Mecklenburg County health director Dr. C.C. Hudson brazenly misled the public about the flu’s deadly impact, under-reporting deaths by at least half. “At the height of the epidemic, when citizens were dying at the rate of more than 10 a week,” he wrote, “they under-reported the scope of the crisis by two-thirds.”

After a one-month quarantine in October 1918, as flu cases receded, the city, pressured by businesses and churches and hearing an inaccurately low total of fatalities, lifted its quarantine against the advice of the medical society. “And influenza roared back into the community,” Washburn wrote, “killing hundreds more.”

Why did they do it? Washburn has no definitive answer, but recounts how the city and county later bragged for decades of escaping the worst of the flu. Was it boosterism? Civic braggadocio? Or a way to keep businesses open, despite the deaths it caused?

Read Washburn’s full story. A complacent press took the mayor’s and doctor’s accounts as truth. Politicians cared more about commerce than people dying. Apply these lessons as you will to today’s situation.

History caution No. 2 comes straight from Hanchett’s book. It shows what happens when a marginalized community distrusts and resists health advice from the establishment.

The time was the 1890s and early 1900s. Southern agriculture hit hard times, and Charlotte’s textile mills lured thousands of workers and families from the farms. The era saw sometimes violent labor protests, a piece of the city’s past that today is all but ignored – a topic for another day. Hanchett tallies walkouts: 45 workers at the Louise Mill in 1897, 100 at Charlotte Clothing Co. and 150 at Highland Park Mill in 1900.

The mill workers lived in company-owned villages lacking city water and sewers and endured 60-hour work weeks and child labor. Wealthier Charlotteans saw how diseases spread easily in the crowded, unsanitary mill villages and among workers with “a pallor peculiar to the cotton mill.”

In the early 1900s, work at N.C. textile mills was harsh, with 60-hour work weeks and, often, child labor. In November 1908 photographer Lewis Hine visited Gastonia’s Loray Mill to depict typical scenes like this. His notes say, “Girls running warping machines in Loray mill, Gastonia, N.C. Many boys and girls much younger. Boss carefully avoided them, and when I tried to get a photo which would include a mite of a boy working at a machine, he was quickly swept out of range. ‘He isn’t working here, just came in to help a little.’ ” Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, National Child Labor Committee Collection, [reproduction number, LC-DIG-nclc-01342]. See more of Hine’s photos at the Library of Congress.

Prosperous residents showed open disdain for millhands and their families, Hanchett writes. “They talked of “textile ‘trash’ and ‘the ignorant factory set.’ ” He quotes one Charlottean: “Mill operatives are responsible themselves themselves for the disgrace that seems to rest upon them.”

The owner of Charlotte Clothing Co. triggered a walkout when he used profane language in the presence of female employees. Workers objected, but the owner responded, “There are no ladies working here.”

Into this climate in 1900 arose fears of a smallpox outbreak. After a few reports of smallpox among black visitors to Charlotte, Hanchett writes, officials began a vaccination campaign. Such vaccinations were relatively new and involved scratching the arm to give a mild form of the disease, which could create flulike symptoms for a few days.

The campaign started with public schools. But when the vaccination team moved into the mill villages they met resistance. Some workers were afraid of the vaccination, saying they had been sick. (Taking time off for illness would likely cut into their pay). Some of those early-day anti-vaxxers were even jailed, including a woman and her 4-year-old boy.

The next day doctors went to the Gingham Mill with the police chief and a squad of officers. Seeing them coming, workers scrambled out doors and windows and would not return until the medical officials left.

Distrust. Misinformation leading to flawed government decisions. Resistance to health advice among people who felt scorned by the powers-that-be. Hmmm.

As Mark Twain is reported to have said, history does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.

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WANT TO BUY THE BOOK AND SUPPORT AN INDEPENDENT LOCAL BOOKSTORE?
Park Road Books at Park Road Shopping Center is taking orders and delivering curbside. See the website for hours and details. For now, the store is closed Saturdays and Sundays.

WANT TO DISCUSS HANCHETT’S BOOK? Here’s a discussion guide

Charlotte fantasies, past and future

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.
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

After the noontime birthday festivities that celebrated the past, I headed off to hear, instead, about an imagined future –
one that would transform an unattractive, car- and truck-filled intersection into a neighborhood of shops, sidewalks, fruit trees and, of course, a brewery.

First-year Master of Urban Design students at UNC Charlotte’s College of Arts + Architecture were presenting their fall semester project: Envisioning a transit-oriented neighborhood near the Old Concord Road light rail stop. It’s just northeast of the Eastway Drive-North Tryon Street intersection, one of the city’s many areas built solely for the benefit of car and truck drivers.
The assignment from Professor Deb Ryan was to draw a plan for the area generally within a 10-minute walk from the station. After she assigned it, Ryan said, she learned that Mecklenburg County had bought a large chunk of the area – the almost-defunct old North Park Mall site, with its vast potholed asphalt parking lot and derelict empty spaces – and planned to turn it into community services offices.

Although such student plans are essentially just theoretical exercises of the imagination, the students opted to incorporate some of the county’s plans into their own – in hopes the county staff might see some ideas and cooperate in helping transform the whole area.
Cardboard model of the envisioned North Park neighborhood. Photo: Mary Newsom

The students offered a vision – and a nifty cardboard model arrayed on the floor – of a walkable neighborhood with plenty of trees, housing and offices set out along streets lined with stores. They envisioned an elementary school, a research campus outpost of UNC Charlotte, which is 4 miles to the north, and a generous helping of affordable housing.

“What we tried to do is push the idea of health and walkability,” Ryan told a small audience of community members and professional urban designers.
The area today has few attributes of walkability. Although it has some begrudging sidewalks, things are built far enough apart that walking isn’t attractive. The stores and restaurants are splayed out along busy thoroughfares with parking lots in front and between them. Many of the smaller streets don’t connect to anything. It’s hard to cross the busy streets. More walkable areas, by contrast, have nearby places you’d want to walk to, interesting shops and businesses set along the sidewalk, lots of connections, and plenty of residents close by so enough people are out and about to make the area feel safer.
As one student said,  “We had to kind of merge reality with fantasy.”
So they proposed, among other things:
  • 12 new connections for streets that, today, dead end.
  • Both a main street running through the area, and a perpendicular market street that would cross Eastway Drive.
  • A brewery in an old warehouse.
  • Flats, town homes, and single family houses
  • Mixed-use buildings with parking decks hidden on the inside, a form known as a “Texas doughnut.”
  • Reconfiguring the Eastway-Tryon intersection to slow the cars bulleting from Eastway onto Tryon.

Possibly the most controversial proposal (or it would be, if this was truly being proposed rather than an in-class exercise) was to reduce by almost half the existing “park” land nearby. 
Those quotes are because the “park” – Eastway Park – is disconnected from everything around it. Its 90 acres are reached via a long driveway (lacking a sidewalk) off the busy Eastway Drive thoroughfare, with no crosswalk or pedestrian light to allow pedestrians to get there. The driveway leads to a grassy area with two soccer fields, a big surface parking lot and a disc golf course.

Although the park is directly next to the railroad, and only a short distance from the Old Concord road light rail station, you can’t walk between the station and the park, thanks to some fenced-off freight rail lines running directly beside the park.

In other words, Eastway Park is a design fail. In my few visits there, admittedly a highly random sample, it’s only lightly used unless there’s a ball game going on. The county park department plans to build a new recreation center there – although that won’t do anything to improve the park’s unwalkable, isolated site.
Hence the students’ idea to take some of the unused park land and built affordable housing there, to improve the “eyes on the park” for safety, and to give lower-income residents a way to easily access a rec center and park. They propose the same for the Hidden Valley Park in the nearby Hidden Valley neighborhood.
Farther down the fantasy end of the spectrum, although intriguing, was this idea: a series of “productive greenspaces” where trees and other food-producing plantings line streets and small parks. You could walk down a sidewalk and pick an apple. Or a peach, or maybe pawpaws.
Will any of it get built? There’s no way to know, because it’s currently just a gleam in the eyes of a group of graduate students. But as Thomas Polk might have advised back in 1768, when he was building a courthouse on spec with visions of town growth: Why not dream big?