Thad Adams House
(ca. 1908)
One of the earliest homes in the Elizabeth neighborhood housed the family of Thad Adams during most of his fifty years of legal practice.
604 Clement Ave, Charlotte, NC 28204
The Thad A. Adams House sits on land that was once part of a seven-acre tract owned by North Carolina Supreme Court justice Heriot Clarkson (1863-1942), who built his own house at what is now Eighth Street and Clement Avenue. Clarkson's property was purchased in 1903 from the Oakhurst Land Company (organized by financier and textile magnate Benjamin D. Heath in 1900), which flanked him on the north, and from the Highland Park Company's Elizabeth Heights on the south (a 1904 development by the Highland Park Company, headed by Peter Marshall Brown). The area became part of the Elizabeth neighborhood, one of Charlotte's earliest and most prestigious streetcar suburbs. The neighborhood is an amalgam of several development projects that began with the blocks around Elizabeth Avenue in 1897 and ended with Rosemont in the 1920s.
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Clarkson, whose property included parts of what are now Clement, Bay, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Streets, began to subdivide his holdings into smaller lots, a number of which he sold to other Charlotte attorneys. Thaddeus Awasaw Adams (1877-1958) purchased one of the first lots. A native of Nash County, North Carolina, Adams received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of North Carolina in 1902 and 1903, respectively. After he graduated, he traveled for the Presbyterian Standard newspaper. Choosing Charlotte as his new home, Adams taught in the Mecklenburg County schools before launching a nearly fifty-year legal career in 1906. A one-time president of the Mecklenburg Bar Association, Adams also taught law classes in his home at night.
In July 1908, Adams bought what is now the northeastern corner of Clement and Ninth Street to build what remains as one of the earliest houses in the Elizabeth neighborhood. In November of that year, he married Emma Dawson Ford (1876-1963), a native of Charlotte County, Virginia. She studied at the Southern Female Institute in Petersburg, Virginia, and taught school in Virginia and eastern North Carolina for several years before her marriage to Adams. Over the next five and a half decades, the couple lived and raised their three children in the suburban house. In the early days, although relatively close to the center of town, the house was still out in the country. Thad used the Seventh Street trolley to commute to work. The family kept a cow, chickens, and pigs during the 1920s, and Emma maintained a large grape arbor, fruit trees, and other plantings behind the house. Over the years, the neighborhood filled in around the Adams’ Colonial Revival-inspired residence with many individually designed and distinctive houses built by Charlotte's business and professional leaders.