Mount Zion Lutheran Church
(ca. 1896)
The Mount Zion Lutheran Church building is one of the oldest structures in Cherry, the model Black community planned by Myers Park namesake John Springs Myers.
1605 Luther St, Charlotte, NC 28204
The Mount Zion Lutheran Church building is one of the oldest structures in Charlotte’s Cherry neighborhood, a model planned housing community for Black Charlotteans developed by John Springs Myers (1847-1925) and Mary Rawlinson Myers (1851-1939) in the 1890s and early 1900s. The community was created to provide good low-cost housing for Black laborers and craft workers well before the 1912 start of construction on the affluent neighboring Myers Park suburb. The land that became Cherry and Myers Park was part of a 306-acre inheritance that Myers received in 1869 from his father. Over the next twenty years, Myers expanded his holdings to over 1,000 acres south of Charlotte. Located about a mile from the city’s center, Cherry is situated between Elizabeth on the north and Myers Park to the south.
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Predating Myers Park by twenty years, Cherry was platted in 1891 as a separate town outside Charlotte’s city limits. Lots were sold for fifty dollars on easy terms. By 1925, some 65% of the 305 Cherry households were resident-owned. Inclusion of institutional, recreational, and commercial facilities as well as landscaping in the plans for Cherry – all features rarely found in working class Black neighborhoods – reflected then-current ideas of proper community development. The Myers family also planned churches, schools, a neighborhood park, and tree-lined streets for Cherry.
Mount Zion Lutheran Church was founded by Reverend William Philo Phifer (1862-1911). After the Civil War, several Protestant denominations sought to establish churches among the formerly enslaved and trained Black preachers and teachers to staff those churches and their often-affiliated schools. Phifer, believed to have grown up on a Phifer plantation in Cabarrus County, was one of the first five Black preachers ordained by the North Carolina Synod of the Lutheran Church following emancipation. Possibly educated in Baltimore, Phifer was first licensed by the Maryland Synod in 1888. He was received into the North Carolina Synod in 1889, and ordained in Charlotte in April 1890. Within three years of his ordination, Phifer had built a congregation of sufficient size that the Missionary Board of the Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America (headquartered in St. Louis) bought property in 1893 in the former Second Ward Black community of Brooklyn to build the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and school. Three years later, Phifer organized Mount Zion Lutheran Church in Cherry. The Missionary Board bought a lot in Cherry on Davidson Street (later renamed Luther Street) for fifty dollars from the Myers family, and built the present Gothic Revival style church building.
By 1898, there were only thirty heads of household in Cherry, so the church’s membership was small and remained so throughout its subsequent years. The church also conducted a school. Mount Zion was actually Cherry’s second church, the first being the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church that later moved from its original Luther Street location to a building at Banter and Baldwin Streets. Phifer left Mount Zion in 1900 to form another church, but his former Cherry congregation continued to operate until 1946 when it merged with the St. Paul’s congregation to form St. Andrews. Harriette C. Dwelle, a descendant of John Myers, purchased the Mount Zion building and, after thirty years of ownership, sold the property to the Mount Zion Church of God, Holiness, in 1976.