Mecklenburg County Courthouse
(ca. 1928)
The Louis Asbury designed Mecklenburg County Courthouse was the subject of a bitter dispute between urban Charlotteans and the county’s rural communities.
700 E Trade St, Charlotte, NC 28202
As a reflection of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s tremendous economic and physical growth during the New South era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Mecklenburg County Courthouse also serves as a reminder of the physical and ideological separations that existed between Charlotte’s urban community and the rural farming communities that surrounded the city. By the 1920s, Charlotte had surpassed Wilmington as North Carolina’s largest city to emerge as the center of a large and profitable southern textile region with a diversified economic base that included banking, power generation and wholesaling. By the early 1920s, the city of Charlotte had outgrown its existing city hall, and Charlotteans began to campaign for a suitably grand new city hall to meet the growing demands of local government.
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A proposal by the Charlotte Observer that was supported by the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce – the construction of a single public building that could serve as both Charlotte’s city hall and Mecklenburg County’s courthouse – surfaced the tensions between the city’s urban population and the county’s rural communities in heated public debate. Although many Charlotteans favored a joint city-county municipal building, the county population of farmers and rural workers felt very differently. Supported by the Charlotte Mayor and the City Council, who favored a separate city hall exclusive to the city, county voters succeeded in defeating the proposition by a two-to-one margin. The new Charlotte-only City Hall building, designed by prominent local architect C. C. Hook (1870-1938), was completed in 1923.
With the City Council housed in a fine spacious structure on East Trade Street, the Board of County Commissioners felt the pressure to upgrade their facility. The same urban/rural divide arose again in the 1925 debate over the county courthouse. Proponents of a new courthouse building, led by Charlotteans who saw the courthouse as a further symbol of the city’s progress, insisted that the new structure be placed next to the new City Hall building on Trade Street, thus creating a single governmental complex. Opponents, largely represented by the county’s farming communities, argued that the existing South Tryon Street courthouse could simply be expanded, insisting that the logical place for the building was the center city where all but one of the previous courthouses had stood. In the end, the urban supporters for a new courthouse proved more convincing, and the Board of County Commissioners voted unanimously in December 1925 to build the new county courthouse on East Trade Street.
The Board retained Charlotte native Louis H. Asbury (1877-1975) to design their $1.25 million Neoclassical building. As North Carolina’s first native-born professionally trained architect to practice in his home state, Asbury designed several notable structures over the years, including the First National Bank skyscraper, Mayfair Manor (now Dunhill Hotel), and the Myers Park and Hawthorne Lane Methodist Churches. His Mecklenburg County Courthouse served as the main courthouse building until 1977, when a new courthouse building was constructed at 800 East 4th Street. Since then, the 1928 Mecklenburg County Courthouse building has served the county as a government office building for departments other than the courts.