Paul and Wilkie Beatty House
(ca. 1911)
The Paul and Wilkie Beatty House and its surrounding neighborhood saw many changes as a result of Charlotte’s Urban Renewal programs of the 1960s and 1970s.
215 S Irwin Ave, Charlotte, NC 28202
The Paul and Wilkie Beatty House is a rare example of a vernacular interpretation of the Prairie Style four square plan house. Constructed by local contractor Robert M. Usher in the streetcar suburb of Woodlawn, the architectural style of the Beatty House developed late in the nineteenth century as a reaction against the ornate and asymmetrical designs of the Queen Anne Style. The new design’s relative simplicity helped usher in the more streamlined Prairie Style. By the 1920s, the four square plan was largely abandoned in favor of the popular two-story massed Colonial Revival style, making the Beatty House all the more unique, especially in Charlotte’s historic urban core.
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The Beatty House was the family home of Paul Barrier Beatty Sr. (1887-1980), his wife Wilkie Lenora Patterson Beatty (1902-1990), and their four children for some thirty-five years. Paul worked as Assistant Wire Chief for the Western Union Telegraph Company. The Beatty family eventually moved to East Boulevard, selling their South Irwin Avenue home to Dallas Dasker Sawyer (1889-1949) and wife Mary McDow Sawyer (1897-1960) in 1946. Dallas worked as a salesman for American Bakeries while Mary was the office secretary at nearby Harding High School (later known as Irwin Avenue Elementary School). Although Dallas passed away within two years of its purchase, Mary lived in the Beatty House until her own death in 1960. The residence thereafter became a boarding house, signaling Woodlawn’s eventual shift from a middle-class neighborhood to a working-class community.
Like many middle-class communities of that period, the original deeds contained restrictive covenants intended to preclude people of color and families of limited financial means. Stipulations requiring that Woodlawn lots “be used for resident purposes and by people of the white race only” and that no dwelling “shall cost less than $1000.00” to build were frequently used to limit who might be eligible in live in specific areas of Charlotte and other cities across the Jim Crow South. As for Woodlawn, development south of downtown robbed the community of its neighborhood identity. With the explosion of suburban construction in the 1950s and 1960s and the office and commercial rezoning of downtown Charlotte came heavy vehicular traffic, destroying the “walkable” feel of Woodlawn’s original design and rendering its residences obsolete. As middle-class families began to leave the neighborhood, it gradually became dominated by working class families, some of whom had left the Brooklyn and First Ward neighborhoods as a result of Urban Renewal programs.
Urban Renewal left Woodlawn and other parts of Third Ward among what many considered the city’s worst neighborhoods. Beginning in 1975, however, when Third Ward was designated as a community Development Target Area, Third Ward experienced a renaissance, thanks in part to housing rehabilitation, infrastructure improvements (including street, sidewalk, landscaping, and park upgrades), and the removal of a nearby scrapyard and railroad tracks. Fortunately, extant structures like the Beatty House have allowed the area to retain some reminders of its historical past.