William Grier House
(ca. 1828)
The circa 1828 William Grier House was the home of one of the first settlers in the Steele Creek community of Charlotte.
8120 Robbie Circle, Charlotte, NC 28278
William McKee Grier (1804-1870) was the grandson of James Grier (1708-1784), one of the earliest Scotch-Irish settlers of Charlotte’s Steele Creek community. In the mid-1740s, James and his wife Margaret conceived and gave birth to a son, William’s father, whom they named Thomas. Thomas Grier (1744-1828) married twice. By his first wife Hannah Alexander (1761-1788), he had four children who attained adulthood. Susannah Grier (1770-1853), daughter of James and Catherine Spratt, was his second wife, by whom Thomas had nine children, including William.
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Thomas Grier was a farmer of considerable prominence in Steele Creek in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who exploited enslaved labor to maintain his agricultural operations. As of 1790, Thomas owned at least five enslaved persons. Upon his death in 1828, his estate included forty-nine enslaved persons. His will bequeathed thirty-eight of those individuals to his family; the remaining eleven persons were sold as part of his estate. William inherited two enslaved person – Isaac and Sindow – from his father and purchased three more individuals from the estate, a man named Curry and two young boys named Lawson and Dave. William continued his father’s reliance upon enslaved labor. By 1860, William had acquired another forty-four enslaved individuals, some twenty-eight of whom were children under the age of eighteen.
In addition to the bequest of enslaved persons, William received from his father’s estate the then-unfinished house now known as the William Grier House as well as the necessary funds to complete construction of the house.
Wllliam married twice. His first wife was Minerva W. Grier (1809-1837), daughter of John Hayes of Lincoln County. She bore him one child, Minerva William Susan Grier, who died within one year. His second wife, Feriba Crockett Edwards Grier (1810-1878), bore six children, most notably Calvin Eli Grier a captain in the Confederate Army who later moved to Charlotte to become a prominent attorney. In 1867 William sold his homeplace to Margaret Jane Lewis (1833-1900), the only child of his half-sister Susan Grier Whyte (1810-1834). Mrs. Lewis retained the property until 1888, when she sold all but ten acres to local farmer Robert Franklin Byrum (1862-1925) and his wife Janie Porter Byrum (1853-1939). Following their deaths, their son Fred K. Byrum (1888-1936) acquired the Grier House. A World War I U.S. Army veteran, Fred worked for many years with the C. W. Upchurch Motor Company, a local Studebaker dealer on West Trade Street. The three children of Fred Byrum and his wife Margaret Rudisill Byrum (1839-1968) retained joint ownership of their father’s estate until 1969, when they divided the property among themselves and gave ownership of the house to Robert Franklin Byrum (1925-1973), then an associate of his uncle William Lester Byrum in operating Byrum’s General Store.