Philip Carey Building
(ca. 1908)
A century-old Victorian Romanesque styled commercial building whose historical offerings have ranged from roofing materials and fertilizer to fiber broadband Internet service.
301 E. 7th St., Charlotte, NC 28202
Located at the northeast corner of Seventh Street and the Southern Railway tracks (once known as “A” Street) between Brevard and College Streets, the Philip Carey Building is one of Charlotte’s eight original warehouses in First and Second Wards along the former Carolina Central Railroad tracks. The building represents the city’s early twentieth-century commercial center that spanned the 36-block area bounded by 7th, Brevard, 2nd, and Mint Streets. The building is also one of the finer local examples of the Victorian Romanesque style in commercial architecture.
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Charlotte businessman and real estate investor William W. Hagood (1852-1927), a Florida native who came to Charlotte about 1892 and owned several buildings throughout the city, constructed the warehouse building for his first tenant, the Philip Carey Company, a national manufacturer and supplier of roofing materials. The building was one of some two dozen railroad-related buildings along the tracks in First and Second Wards, including a coal yard, lumber yard, planing mill, cotton gin, meat packing houses, grain company, jute bagging factory, and warehouses for products ranging from cotton and farm machinery to hardware and groceries.
The Philip Carey Company occupied the building until about 1915 when the company apparently went out of business. In 1917, the Ford Motor Company used the structure for auto body building and trimming; the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company later maintained a warehouse there. Hagood sold the property in 1918 to the Charlotte Electric Repair Company, which in turn sold it to investors W. M. Moore and Felix Hayman in 1920. The building remained in the Hayman family for nearly sixty years during which time the building housed a variety of tenants: the Kelly-Springfield Tire Company; American Cyanamid Chemicals (primarily fertilizer); American Aniline Products, Inc. (dyestuffs); Mathews-Morse Sales Company (mill supplies); and Wilson Lewith Machine Storage. In 2016, Google launched its local Google Fiber service from the century-old warehouse building.