Frederick Apartments
(ca. 1927)
The Frederick Apartments were once the home of W. J. Cash, author of the influential social history The Mind of the South.
515 N Church St, Charlotte, NC 28202
During its boom years of the 1920s, as it became the Carolinas’ biggest city, Charlotte experienced a 78% population explosion, growing from 46,388 to 82,675 citizens in the span of one decade. That increase necessitated more housing, and Charlotte’s construction industry quickly responded. Although apartments had appeared in the city by the early 1900s, that housing option did not catch on until the 1920s. As part of the growing interest in multi-unit housing, Tennessee native William Frederick Casey (1874-1957) commissioned the J. A. Jones Construction Company (builders of the now-demolished 1909 Independence Building, North Carolina's first steel-frame skyscraper) to build the Frederick Apartments in 1927. The 36-unit Frederick Apartments building represents the wave of medium-sized apartment houses built in the late 1920s as apartment construction grew to a record level.
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Casey moved to Charlotte in 1914, the same year he married Mae E. Cook (1884-1950). Casey worked primarily as a manufacturer’s agent for building materials and contractor’s equipment ranging from ornamental metals and elevator enclosures to dumb waiters and incinerators. He also handled ornamental terra cotta roofing tile and clay products, both of which feature prominently on the Frederick’s façade, a unique feature unmatched in the era’s local architecture.
It is unclear who designed the Frederick – Casey may have provided the plans himself – but the building’s configuration reflected the era’s spatial organization and social concept of apartment life. It featured two categories of apartments – bachelor apartments and housekeeping units – for two distinct types of renters. The one or two room “bachelor apartments” were designed to house young men who presumably neither cooked nor entertained. The larger “housekeeping units” featured full kitchens and living rooms and were marketed primarily to females and couples. Completed in five months, the Frederick was the Caseys’ home until they sold the building in 1929. Almost all of the original tenants were employed within walking distance of the building.
Most notable among the Frederick’s residents over the years was journalist Wilber Joseph Cash (1900-1941). Born in Gaffney, South Carolina, the longtime North Carolinian and Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaperman was known professionally as W. J. Cash. After graduating from Wake Forest University, Cash held a variety of teaching posts and writing jobs, including periodic employment with Charlotte’s rival newspapers, the Charlotte Observer and the Charlotte News. Cash lived briefly at the Selwyn Hotel (no longer standing) before moving to the Frederick in 1938. He occupied Apartment 210a in 1939 and Apartment 308 in 1940, during which time he completed the manuscript for his best-known work, the seminal social history The Mind of the South (1941). The book was described in 1970 as “perhaps the most intellectually influential book ever to come from North Carolina.” Cash courted and married his wife Mary Ross Northrup (1906-1980) while living at the Frederick, and the couple began their married life in the building before moving in 1941 to a larger apartment at the Blandwood Apartments on South Tryon Street. Tragically, in the midst of a nervous breakdown later that year, Cash took his own life.