Nevin School
(ca. 1923, 1940)
The Nevin School has served a valued educational resource for Charlotte for more than a century.
3523 Nevin Rd, Charlotte, NC 28269
Represented by its 1923 brick four-room school building and 1940 auditorium, the Nevin School is one of Charlotte’s oldest remaining schoolhouses. Nevin emerged as an agrarian community in the late-nineteenth century. As the result of the railroad and the city’s rapid industrial development, Nevin and other rural communities along the Charlotte periphery soon saw their farmland carved away by housing subdivisions as the burgeoning Queen City sprawled outward in the mid-twentieth century.
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The Nevin Academy (later, the Nevin School) was founded by John Porter Hunter and his wife Sallie E. Hunter. Hunter was born in the Mallard Creek township in 1852, and eventually became one of the 10 citizens that formed the “Section House” community, renamed Derita in 1882. He served as magistrate in Nevin for over sixty years. As a member of the local district’s committee for the Mecklenburg County Board of Education, the Hunters donated a half-acre of land and dozens of books around 1889 so that the Nevin Academy might be built. One of sixty-seven White public schools within the Mecklenburg County school system, the Nevin Academy was originally a wood-frame single-teacher schoolhouse.
By 1921, the wooden Nevin School had been expanded to accommodate two teachers, but the growing community needed a larger school. Nevin’s Help-One-Another Club convinced the county Board of Education for the need for an entirely new school building for four teachers. A new brick-veneer school building constructed for $6,000 burned to the ground within one year of its completion and replaced in 1923 by the extant schoolhouse. To accommodate each elementary grade level in a four-room building, two consecutive grades would share the same teacher. With a capacity of 125 students, the Nevin School served an entire district with a total of 103 pupils by 1925.
An auditorium was added in 1940, connected to the schoolhouse via a brick breezeway. The addition was designed by Charlotte architect Lucian Dale, who also designed the nearby Derita High School Gym. The new auditorium provided the Nevin School with a stage and its first set of indoor bathrooms. The auditorium also served as the school cafeteria for some time.
The Nevin community remained largely rural well into the 1950s, despite Charlotte’s significant expansion. That isolation would eventually lead the county Board of Education to target the Nevin School as one of the schools to be consolidated into larger schools capable of sustaining hundreds of children. The Nevin School was shuttered in January 1955, and its students were consolidated into the new Statesville Road Elementary School. The Nevin School was later adapted for use as a vocational school for developmentally disabled adults, making it the first such direct service training center of its kind in the Carolinas.