Introduction: Building Charlotte

The railroad men stooped and lifted, stooped and lifted, their breath heavy in the October air. Beside them rose piles of hand-hewn oak crossties, each 7 feet long and 8 inches thick. One by one, the workers laid the ties across the gravel roadbed, two and a half feet apart, more than 2,000 per mile. They hefted iron rails into place atop the wood, each rail 18 feet long and weighing more than 300 pounds. The sound of hammers striking metal spikes rang through the air, mingling with shouted orders and perhaps scraps of song. The men had risen before sunrise and would work to sunset.

A mile or so away, people in the town of Charlotte listened eagerly for the whistle of the train that resupplied the lines as they inched forward. One crosstie, one rail at a time, the railroad men were bringing prosperity to town. 1

The Charlotte and South Carolina Railroad, which linked farmers in the North Carolina Piedmont with the bustling port of Charleston, S.C., would transform the region. Until the trains arrived, Charlotte was just another North Carolina town, a handful of streets, homes and small businesses that housed about a thousand residents. When George Washington passed through in 1791, he famously termed it a “trifling place.” The people and goods transported on the rails linked the Queen City to the world and helped make it the metropolis it is today – a center of trade, manufacturing, and finance.

On October 21, 1852, an enormous crowd met the first passenger trains that steamed to a stop at the newly completed depot, built on 2nd Street between College and Brevard. City officials had issued “a general invitation to the citizens of North and South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and the ‘rest of mankind’ personally to appear in the town of Charlotte.” They promised an event of Biblical proportions – “the largest Barbecue that has been given since the flood.” 2 Nearly 20,000 people heeded the call, coming to eat, dance, hear speeches, view fireworks and take in what the local paper called “the most brilliant and glorious day that the history of Charlotte has furnished for seventy-odd years.” 3

Little of the ensuing prosperity, however, would trickle down to the people who did the hardest work. Across the South, railroads were built by Black men and women whose freedom had been stolen. They cleared trees, dug and blasted rocks, shoveled dirt and gravel, battled rushing water to build bridge piers, constructed depots, cooked and cleaned. They built Charlotte and the South. Their labor brought most of them little in return.

Most local histories, even today, describe Charlotte as shaped by hardworking Scots-Irish Presbyterians, whose thrift and independence helped fuel the American Revolution and laid the foundation for an industrial boom. Numbers tell a different story. In 1850, almost half of Charlotte’s residents – 47 percent – could trace their ancestry to Africa. The vast majority were enslaved.

The stories of these Black residents and their descendants mingle strength and hardship, accomplishment and setback, joy and pain. Kidnapped from their homelands, imprisoned in a system that cast them as less than fully human, they nonetheless endured, bonding with each other, looking out for opportunity and building resilient, supportive cultures. Through slavery, through war, through Jim Crow segregation and into the 21st century, Black residents from all walks of life have played essential roles in making Charlotte the city it is today, doing much with little and rarely getting full credit for their contributions. Everyone in Charlotte needs to know their stories.