Crane Company Building
(ca. 1928)
The Crane Company building is indicative of the commercial concerns that flourished in the West Morehead Street industrial corridor during the early 20th century.
1307 W Morehead St, Charlotte, NC 28208
The Crane Company building exemplifies the storage and wholesale warehouses built in Charlotte during the early twentieth century when the city emerged as a regional industrial, distribution, and commercial center. As a result of the rapid expansion of cotton mills during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Charlotte became the hub of the southern textile manufacturing industry. By the 1920s the Piedmont of the Carolinas had surpassed New England as the world’s leading textile producer. Textiles attracted other industries to Charlotte. By the 1920s, the city’s 141 factories manufactured eighty-one different products, and its population soared from 7,000 in 1880 to over 82,000 in 1929. As the largest city in the Carolinas, Charlotte enjoyed a 150-mile trading radius with more than 4.5 million consumers.
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The city’s growing commercial and manufacturing base needed warehousing and wholesaling facilities sited with rail and highway access and proximity to the center city. By the late 1920s, Charlotte supported eight storage warehouses and eleven transfer and moving companies. The Crane Company was a national manufacturer and distributor of plumbing supplies. Founded in Charlotte by Cyril G. Smith (1881-1951) in 1918, the company started on West First Street with a warehouse on West Palmer Street. Its 1928 West Morehead Street building was one of the earliest warehouses constructed along the emerging industrial corridor that linked the center city to the newly built Wilkinson Boulevard (1927), the state’s first four-lane highway. West Morehead continued to attract industrial and warehousing facilities until the 1950s and early 1960s when the construction of I-85 reoriented much of the city’s industrial geography. The Crane Company continued operations on West Morehead Street until 1942, when it relocated to West First Street. The Ford Motor Company acquired the Crane Company’s former building, using it as an automobile repair shop. It was later converted for office use.
The Crane Company building survives as one of the best preserved commercial or industrial properties within the West Morehead Street industrial corridor. In its use of reinforced concrete construction, the building illustrates the innovations in structural engineering and factory and warehouse design that transformed industrial construction during the early twentieth century. Technological advances, especially in the reinforcement systems used in concrete construction, made factories and warehouses largely fireproof and offered several structural advantages over either heavy timber mill construction or steel framing. The great strength of reinforced concrete framing, combined with the innovative extensive girder system for even greater structural support, was of particular importance in the design of multiple-story buildings housing heavy materials, like the Crane Company building.