Potts Barber Shop

The Stough-Cornelius/Potts Barber Shop building is one of only seven remaining early 20th century commercial buildings fronting what was once Cornelius’ bustling business and local government corridor of Catawba Avenue. The individual histories of the joined structures offer a unique narrative of the town’s development, both as to the local economic growth driven by the traditional southern cotton industry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the entrepreneurial achievements and community efforts of rural African Americans in the face of decades of Jim Crow segregation.

Started in 1891, the Stough-Cornelius Cotton Mill provided the impetus for the settlement and incorporation of the town of Cornelius. This building is the final remaining structure representing that company. In later years, the former Stough-Cornelius building also headquartered the Cornelius Electric Membership Corporation, the town’s first electric cooperative formed in 1940 under the sponsorship of the federal government’s Rural Electric Administration. 

The Potts Barber Shop building is notable in part for its 60+ year multigenerational association with the family of Wilson Henry Potts (1912-2000), an early civic leader of Smithville, one of the oldest African American communities in north Mecklenburg County. Potts, who first learned barbering in 1926 at the age of 14, began working as a fulltime barber in the 1940s on Brick Row, a series of shops once located near the intersection of Main Street and Catawba Avenue. He first worked for Black barber Rutledge Norton, then for White barber Clarence Blakely. Both shops were segregated, catering only to a White clientele. Blakely and Potts were likely Cornelius’ first interracial barber team. In the 1950s, Potts purchased Blakely’s shop, moving the renamed Potts Barber Shop to the present location in 1960. There, the barber shop began its longstanding role as a prominent center of social activity for the town’s male population. In 1972, Potts welcomed Black customers, making Potts Barber Shop the town’s first racially integrated barber shop.

Wilson Potts was also a pillar of Smithville’s African American community. Starting in the 1950s, he played an integral in bringing running water, sewer and electric service, street lights, and paved roads to Smithville, all long before the community’s 1980 incorporation into the town of Cornelius. In the early 1950s, Wilson and four other men founded the Smithville Better Community Club and led the community’s efforts to raise funds to purchase the then-unused Smithville Rosenwald School and convert the building into a community center.