Hermitage Court Gateways
(ca. 1912)
Crafted by Scottish artisans, the Hermitage Court Gateways have marked the entrances for the most exclusive enclave within the Myers Park neighborhood for more than a century.
322 Providence Rd & 400 Hermitage Ct, Charlotte NC 28207
In February 1912, the Simmons Company, a Charlotte-based real estate firm, announced its purchase of a tract of land adjacent to the elegant Myers Park streetcar suburb that had been started recently by George Stephens (1873-1946) and his Stephens Company. Attorney Floyd Macon Simmons (1882-1973), a respected local real estate investor who headed the Simmons Company, joined forces with Stephens to develop an elite subdivision within Myers Park called Hermitage Court as an enhancement for what was already becoming a destination neighborhood. Located adjacent to the center of Myers Park, Hermitage Court targeted the city’s elite by featuring the largest lots within the Myers Park development.
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To ensure a consistent built environment, Simmons retained the same renowned urban designer and landscape architect – John Nolen (1869-1937) and Earle Sumner Draper (1893-1994) – used by Stephens for Myers Park to design Hermitage Court and its infrastructure. Before his work on Myers Park and Hermitage Court, Nolen – a graduate of the Wharton School and Harvard who maintained an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts – had become a favored designer in Charlotte due to his design for the city’s Independence Park.
Potentially leveraging historical nostalgia to promote his subdivision, Simmons named the community after The Hermitage, the Nashville, Tennessee, home place of North Carolina native President Andrew Jackson. The design of the Hermitage Court Gateways was specifically chosen to reproduce as near as possible the gate entrances of Jackson’s home. According to the Charlotte Observer, reporting in 1912, the developers of Hermitage Court believed that “these gateways will lend a tone and exclusiveness to the suburb which could be derived in no other way.” In fact, the stone pillars were actually part of Nolen’s original Myers Park plan, but as the pillars did not materialize for Myers Park, Simmons eagerly added them to his subdivision.
Construction of the gateways was in progress by early September 1912 as the Hermitage Court neighborhood approached its October 10, 1912, grand opening. The granite gateways, pointed with red cement mortar, were constructed by two Scottish artisans who traveled from Aberdeen, Scotland, specifically for the gateway project. One gate bears the inscription “Ye Easte Gayte”; the other, “Ye Weste Gayte.”