Ziglar-Bowers House
(ca. 1923)
The Ziglar-Bowers House evidences the history of Charlotte’s mid-twentieth century urban demographic transition.
421 Heathcliff St, Charlotte, NC 28208
The Ziglar-Bowers House, located in the Wesley Heights Historic District, is a locally significant historic and architectural resource. It is the best example of only two surviving Craftsman-Colonial Revival residences in Wesley Heights, one of Charlotte’s last early twentieth-century inner-ring suburbs. The house is also significant for its associative history of Charlotte’s mid-twentieth century urban demographic transition.
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The Wesley Heights neighborhood, started by the Wadsworth Land Company but developed primarily by the Charlotte Investment Company in the early 1920s, featured such modern conveniences as sidewalks, sewer and city water, lighting, and telephone service, as well as ready access to streetcar lines. The neighborhood’s initial development targeted white-collar workers and their families like John Franklin Ziglar (1886-1942), a civil engineer with Southern Railway, his wife Jennie Lee Davis Ziglar (1885-1960), and their children Frank Conder Ziglar (1915-1947) and Ellen Jane Ziglar Clark (1924-2014).
When the Ziglars sold the house in 1935, the financial landscape of housing in Charlotte and across the country had begun to change. In the late 1930s, a discriminatory practice known as redlining shifted the character of many established neighborhoods by systematically denying services (especially financial services like mortgages and insurance) to residents and aspiring residents of certain neighborhoods based on those areas’ racial or ethnic composition. Redlining effectively transitioned the once white-collar Wesley Heights into a predominately white working-class neighborhood, with residents like career postal worker Paul Chadwick Bowers (1905-1985) and his wife Juanita L. Bowers (1909-1977) who purchased this Heathcliff Street house in 1937.
Racism again altered Wesley Heights in the 1960s as school integration initiated changes in the racially segregated society. Charlotte’s Board of Education assigned 210 Black children and 74 white children to the Wesley Heights School for the 1964-1965 school year. Over the summer, many white families moved or requested transfers. Soon after the start of that school year, no white students remained at that school. Like many neighborhoods in Charlotte and throughout the South, Wesley Heights also experienced blockbusting, an unsavory practice by unscrupulous real estate agents who visited white residents warning of Black families moving into their neighborhoods as renters or homeowners. The ensuing “white flight” by many white residents from Charlotte’s inner suburbs to neighborhoods further afield or smaller towns throughout the county, combined with the aggressive Urban Renewal campaign that forced Black Charlotteans out of inner-city communities, accelerated the demographic transition of Wesley Heights from overwhelmingly white to Black in the 1970s.
The Bowers were among the last holdouts on Heathcliff Street, finally selling their house to Black couple Heyward Jackson (1928-2008) and Kay Frances Jackson (1941-2003) in June 1971. Although the Jacksons moved elsewhere in 1975, they kept the house as rental property until 1989. Between 1989 and 2021, the Ziglar-Bowers House changed hands eleven times.