Biddle Memorial Hall
(ca. 1884)
The first and oldest surviving building on the Johnson C. Smith University campus, the impressive Biddle Memorial Hall has been a campus landmark for more than 130 years.
100 Beatties Ford Road, Charlotte, NC 28216
Biddle Memorial Hall is the prominent campus centerpiece of Johnson C. Smith University. Built in 1884 when the institution was known as Biddle University, Biddle Hall was the first substantial building erected on the current campus and is the oldest surviving structure on campus. Dominated by a massive but elegant clock tower, the structure contains 40,045 square feet of floor space. Its ornamentation and overall massing are typical of institutional architecture during the Victorian era. It originally consisted of an auditorium with a seating capacity of 600, the President's offices, the Registrar's offices, and the Business Office, while also serving as the school’s first library and classrooms. It is currently the University’s general administration building and exhibits a collection of portraits and pictures of the founders, presidents, benefactors, and other individuals directly connected with the growth and development of the University.
Property Quick Links
The University was founded in 1867 by two white ministers, Samuel C. Alexander and Willis L. Miller, under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church. During its formative years, the institution received considerable financial support from Mary Duke Biddle, a tobacco heiress of Philadelphia and Durham whose husband was killed in action during the Civil War while serving as a Union Army major. The school was therefore first named The Henry J. Biddle Memorial Institute in his honor. Primarily intended to instruct Black teachers and ministers, the college opened with fewer than twelve students and two instructors in a small church near the present location of Fourth and Davidson Streets. A few years later, the city’s old Confederate Navy Building (then located on East Trade St., below where the Civic Center now stands) was purchased with plans to relocate it to Seventh Street – somewhere between College and Caldwell Streets – as a new school building. Local entrepreneur Colonel William R. Myers discouraged that move, offering Alexander and Miller eight acres of land in 1868 which have since become the nucleus of the University’s current campus. Renamed Biddle University in 1883, the school had a faculty of thirteen and a student body of 187 by 1888; nearly one-third of its total enrollment was preparing for the ministry, and tuition was free. Subsequent generous gifts to the institution by Jane Berry Smith in honor of her husband (reportedly a tin mill operator) prompted the University’s Board of Trustees to rechristen the institution Johnson C. Smith University in 1921 and name its administration building in memory of Major Biddle.
Biddle Memorial Hall was constructed at a cost of $40,000 secured primarily through the efforts of faculty member Reverend Thomas Lawrence under the auspices of the Board of Missions for Freedmen of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Substantial financial support came from the local community, including $10,000 from the Freedmen’s Bureau and $1,400 from Mary Biddle. The designer of the building is unknown, but it was constructed in large part by the University’s students who also made the bricks for the building. The carillon chime clock was added to the building's tower in 1925, funded by the University’s alumni, students, and friends. With the longstanding largesse of supporters like Mary Biddle and Jane Smith, as well as an endowment by James B. Duke, Johnson C. Smith University has continued its educational mission anchored by its central operations within Biddle Memorial Hall.