Baxter Davidson House
(ca. 1927)
The Baxter Davidson House was the final home of one of Mecklenburg County’s most passionate advocates for preserving the county’s rich history.
1115 Colville Rd, Charlotte, NC 28207
The Baxter Davidson House was originally built by John H. McArn, an aspiring but ultimately unsuccessful land developer. He had hoped to develop 102 acres north of Myers Park into a new neighborhood in the mid-1920s just when Charlotte’s housing boom was in full swing. That deal never came to fruition. Nor did a subsequent deal for the construction of two apartment buildings. But McArn did manage to build this fine brick-veneered house for he and his wife Bessie. Unfortunately, he decided to leverage the equity in his new home as partial payment for construction costs on some of his projects. He lost the house in foreclosure in 1930, seven months after the stock market crash.
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Edward Lee Baxter Davidson (1858-1944), a lifelong Mecklenburg County resident, purchased the house in 1935. He was a member of the prominent Davidson family that counted among their ancestors Revolutionary War commander General William Lee Davidson (1746-1781), who was killed at the Battle of Cowan’s Ford. Born at the family’s Rural Hill plantation (built in 1788 and destroyed by fire in 1886) to Mary Laura Springs (1813- 1872) and Adam Brevard Davidson (1808-1896), Baxter was the fourteenth of the couple’s fifteen children.
An 1880 graduate of Davidson College and the school’s largest individual benefactor, Baxter amassed considerable wealth from the acquisition, management, and selling of real estate, including several properties at the juncture of Trade and Tryon Streets. A passionate student of history, in no small part due to his prominent family, he used that fortune to educate the local citizenry about Mecklenburg County’s role in the American Revolutionary War. He personally designed and financed the construction of fieldstone monuments honoring the Revolutionary War Battles of McIntyre’s Farm and Cowan’s Ford (October 3, 1780, and February 1, 1781, respectively), the battlefield death of General Davidson (February 1, 1781), the Rural Hill homestead of his great grandfather Major John Davidson, and the founding of the Hopewell and Williams Memorial Presbyterian Churches (1762 and 1885, respectively), all of which are locally designated historic landmarks.
Baxter Davidson remained a bachelor until 1935 when, at the age of 76, he married 48-year-old widow Sarah Williams Vosburg (1886-1973), a descendant of William A. Williams, a signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The newlyweds purchased what came to be known as the Baxter Davidson House in July 1935. Baxter died in his sleep at home in October 1944. His death launched what was believed to have been the county’s largest contested will lawsuit up to that time when several of his relatives sued to overturn the will. Fortunately, Baxter had appropriately provided for Sarah, allowing her to remain in the Colville Road house and to receive a steady income stream for the remainder of her life. The court matter ultimately settled, allowing for Baxter’s bequest of the bulk of his estate to Davidson College to remain largely intact according to his wishes.