Carter Hall
(ca. 1895)
Built in 1895, the Gothic Revival-styled Carter Hall is the oldest dormitory on the campus of Johnson C. Smith University.
100 Beatties Ford Road, Charlotte, NC 28216
Carter Hall is the oldest dormitory on the Johnson C. Smith University campus. Built in 1895 when the institution was known as Biddle University, Carter Hall is situated on the northeastern corner of the University Quadrangle. The unique Gothic Revival design is accentuated by the structure’s wooden cupola. Indeed, it is believed that Carter Hall is the oldest structure within Mecklenburg County to possess both a cupola and circular pavilions. Much of the labor for this 15,758 square foot building was performed by students under the supervision of the University’s Industrial Department. Although the interior has been completely reconstructed to allow for continued adaptive use of the building, Carter Hall’s exterior is almost entirely original to its nineteenth-century construction.
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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.