John Hunter House
(ca. 1869)
The Greek Revival style John Hunter House was the home of generations of the Hunter family for nearly a century.
5607 Sardis Rd, Charlotte, NC 28270
An 1869 fire forced Reverend John Hunter (1814-1886) to construct a new home in the rural Sardis township of Mecklenburg County. The result, this his new vernacular Greek Revival farmhouse, is now one of the few remnants of the built environment of that old township.
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Born in Mecklenburg County, Hunter was the second of ten children born to Henry and Martha Hunter. His grandfather, also named Henry Hunter (1751-1836), had emigrated from Ireland in the early 1770s, and volunteered for service in Captain William Alexander’s company during the Revolutionary War, helping to defend Charlotte against the British. The elder Hunter was also a founder and longtime elder of Prosperity Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. John Hunter graduated from Pennsylvania’s Jefferson College in 1841, and began his theological studies in Divinity Hall, Due West, South Carolina. Following his 1843 licensure by the First Presbytery, John was ordained and installed as the minister of the Back Creek, Prosperity, and Gilead Churches in Mecklenburg County. In 1859, he was installed as the pastor at Sardis A.R.P. Church (now Sardis Presbyterian Church), a post he held for 27 years until overtaken by ill health.
Two days after receiving his license, Reverend Hunter was married to Mecklenburg County resident Isabella Peoples, with whom he had four children. Following Isabella’s 1859 death, the minister married Martha Simonton Bell of Fairfield County, South Carolina, in 1861. She also predeceased Reverend Hunter, who then remarried a third time in 1866, to Mary Ann McDill. In his will, Reverend Hunter left the Hunter House to his son Dr. Lester Walker Hunter, a prominent Mecklenburg County physician. A graduate of Erskine College and the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Baltimore and Bellevue Hospital, New York City, Dr. Hunter had returned to Mecklenburg County in 1875 to settle in a house near his father's Sardis Road home and to begin his rural horseback medical practice of nearly sixty years.
In 1898, Dr. Hunter sold the John Hunter House to his older brother Richard Brown Hunter. A fellow Erskine College graduate, R. B. Hunter farmed the family homeplace and became a longtime schoolteacher. He later served as County Superintendent of Education. In 1915, R. B. Hunter sold the homestead to his daughter Eliza Isabella Hunter Alexander and her husband Ellis U. Alexander. Members of the Hunter family retained ownership of the house until 1964.