Mount Carmel Baptist Church
(ca. 1921)
The Mount Carmel Baptist Church congregation grew so rapidly that they needed North Carolina’s first native-born professionally trained architect to design their new sanctuary.
412 Campus St., Charlotte, NC 28216
Since the 1870s, Mount Carmel Baptist Church has been an integral part of Biddleville, the African American community that grew up beside the campus of Biddle Memorial Institute. Started in 1867 by the Presbyterian church to educate young Black freedmen to become teachers and preachers, the school came to be known as Biddle University, and later Johnson C. Smith University. The original Biddleville resulted primarily from the efforts of Dr. Stephen Mattoon (1815-1886) who served from 1870 to 1886 as Biddle Institute's first president. Mattoon personally acquired land adjacent to the school’s campus that he then resold to the formerly enslaved on modest affordable terms.
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As the school grew in numbers, so too did the population of Biddleville and the religious needs of its residents. Mount Olive Baptist Church began with a small Biddleville prayer group that met in members’ homes or under a large oak tree in the village. In 1878, the group resolved to form a Missionary Baptist Church in Biddleville and found a location in an old shop (once used as a barroom) within the 600 block of Beatties Ford Road. There, in 1878, Reverend Elder Eagle, pastor of Charlotte’s First Baptist Church, formally prefected the Mount Carmel Baptist Church. By year’s end, the members decided to call a pastor, choosing then-Biddle University student Albert Lewis who led the congregation for twenty years. During his tenure, Reverend Lewis organized the board of deacons, a women’s missionary society, and a Sunday school.
As membership increased, the congregation wanted to own its place of worship. In 1883, church trustee Cary Etheridge purchased a 100-foot square lot on Church (now Campus) Street in Biddleville for $32. After six months of labor and approximately $250 in construction costs, the congregation moved into a new frame building, complete with pews and pulpit furniture crafted by church members. Under the subsequent tenure of Reverend Samuel S. Person (1902-1906), the Mount Carmel membership grew to seventy-eight. But it was during the fifty-year pastorate of Reverend William H. Davidson (1914-1964) that the church made its most significant progress. Rapid growth of the congregation necessitated a new sanctuary. In March 1918, the congregation engaged well-known local architect Louis H. Asbury Sr. to draw up plans for Biddleville’s first non-university brick building. Asbury – North Carolina’s first native-born professionally trained architect and the state’s first member of the American Institute of Architects – also designed such notable buildings as the Mecklenburg County Courthouse, the First National Bank skyscraper on South Tryon Street, and the Myers Park and Hawthorne Lane Methodist Churches.
The three-room church was expanded with additional rooms in 1925. An annex and second building were added in 1935 and 1948, respectively. By 1977, growth within the Biddleville and the Mount Carmel congregation required relocation to a new campus on Tuckaseegee Road.