John & Idella Mayes House
(ca. 1902)
A rare local example of a Shingle Style house, the John and Idella Mayes House is the sole remaining turn-of-the-century house in Charlotte’s old Second Ward.
435 E Morehead St, Charlotte, NC 28202
The John and Idella Mayes House is the only surviving turn-of-the-century house remaining in Charlotte’s old Second Ward, one of the few remaining fine houses built on the once-fashionable Morehead Street. Built and occupied by John Henry and Idella Green Mayes (1864-1947 and 1869-1939, respectively) for twenty-four years, the house is a rare intact example of the Shingle Style house, a style unique to Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.
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Married in the later 1800s, John and Idella moved to Charlotte in the early 1900s, where they raised four children while John worked as a textile machinery agent and mill executive and designer. The family built its stately home in an upscale section of East Morehead Street at the edge of the city’s first suburb, Dilworth. Their immediate neighbors included Stewart W. Cramer (1868-1940), a major New South textile entrepreneur, and William States Lee (1872-1934), who became the president of Duke Power Company and the Piedmont and Northern Railroad.
Born in Luftborough, England, John came to the U.S. at the age of fourteen. As a young man, he entered the textile industry, most likely in Massachusetts, where his oldest daughter was born. In Charlotte, Mayes worked as a traveling salesman for Cramer, who is credited with designing and equipping about one-third of all the cotton mills in the South prior to World War II.
In 1906, Mayes, Cramer, and three others organized the Mayes Manufacturing Company, with Mayes as president. The company built a cotton mill and the Cramer-designed mill village Mayesworth in Gaston County in 1907, all while Mayes continued as a sales agent for Cramer. By 1910, Mayes was no longer president of Mayes Manufacturing, apparently setting himself up as an independent agent for manufacturers of cotton mill machinery. Cramer took control of Mayes Manufacturing in 1915 and changed the name to Mayes Mills. Meanwhile, Mayes became the “architect-engineer” (basically, a mill designer and outfitter) and first president for the Rex Spinning Company’s new mill in the Gaston County town of Ranlo. By 1920, he was also the architect-engineer for the Pricilla Spinning Company mill in Ranlo, as well as its first president. In 1922, he became a director of Cramer’s new Cramerton Mills company that had absorbed Mayes Mills and renamed its mill village Cramerton.
The Mayes family lived in the Morehead Street house until 1926 when, at the age of 70, John apparently retired, and he and Idella decided they no longer needed such a large house. They sold the house to J. W. Barber, a vice-president of the Cathey Lumber Company, and moved to 307 East Kingston in Dilworth before moving in with their daughter and son-in-law Idella Mayes and Frank Hunter (1894-1956 and 1893-1969, respectively) at 1815 South Boulevard. In 1939, the Home Owners Loan Corporation took over the East Morehead Street house from the Barbers, and sold it to A. J. and Nannie Willoughby. The house changed hands several times thereafter before being converted to office space in the late 1980s.