H. M. Wade House
(ca. 1930)
The Georgian Colonial styled H. M. Wade House was the home of the entrepreneurial founder of the Wade Manufacturing Company.
530 Hermitage Rd, Charlotte, NC 28207
Columbus, Georgia, native Howard Madison Wade (1876-1961) originally trained as an educator. Following his graduation from Emory University, H. M. served as the principal at Columbus High School, where he also taught Latin and Greek as well as modern and medieval history. In 1901, one year after marrying the former Rosalie Tarver (1878-1956), H. M. decided to leave the teaching profession and apply his talents to the business world. He traveled north to enroll in the Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he studied commerce and banking. He then returned to Columbus to become vice president of the Georgia Manufacturing Company, and later the secretary-treasurer of the Massey-Perkins Yarn and Hosiery Manufacturing Company.
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In 1906, the Wade family moved to Charlotte looking for more business opportunities in the bustling city and a more favorable climate for Rosealie. Then a thirty-year-old entrepreneur, H. M. started the Wade Manufacturing Company, located off South Graham Street, to produce custom interiors, primarily of fine polished wood, that included fixtures, furnishings, and paneling for stores, banks, churches, and similar establishments for over seventy years. He brought expert craftsmen from Europe to make the furnishings that the company supplied throughout the Carolinas and across the South.
In 1911, the Wades decided to move from their city home at 610 North Church Street to the suburban Myers Park development created by businessman George Stephens (1873-1946) from his father-in-law’s 1,200 acre farm. The Wades were one of the first property owners in that community designed by professional landscape architect and town planner John Nolen (1869-1937). The enterprising H. M. designed the family’s first Hermitage Road residence himself, enlisting workers from his company to build it. By the 1920s, H. M. had became acquainted with the opulent revivalist mansions designed by Philadelphia architect Charles Barton Keene (1868-1931), including the sixty-room Reynolda House designed for R. J. Reynolds in 1917 outside of Winston-Salem and the 1927 home of H. M.’s neighbor Charles E. Lambeth (1893-1948), the successful businessman and one-time Charlotte mayor who resided at 435 Hermitage Road. H. M. hired Keene to design his new home, collaborating extensively on the plans with the noted architect and personally negotiating with the contractors. Construction of the steel-girdered Georgian Colonial mansion took nearly three years at a cost of $63,865. Earle S. Draper (1893-1994), the most important landscape architect and planner in the southern United States in the early twentieth century, designed the grounds of the house.
H. M., who served as president of the Charlotte Country Club for twenty-five years, retired from manufacturing in 1954 to go into the real estate business. Rosalie passed away two years later. The house remained in the Wade family until 1978, with H. M. living in the home until his 1961 death and his second wife Louise Watkins Powe Wade (1901-1990) residing in the home for another sixteen years. The Wade House remains as one of the few houses of its size – 14,000 square feet or more – in Charlotte that is essentially intact as originally built.