Dr. Whitley Office Building
(ca. 1909)
Dr. Whitley’s office building offers a rare glimpse into the practice of an early twentieth century Mecklenburg County country doctor.
4311 Hillside Drive, Mint Hill, NC 28227
The office building of Dr. Ayer Manny Duncan Whitley (1884-1951) is a remnant of the rural environment that once supported country doctors in Mint Hill and other outlying areas of Mecklenburg County. While it is believed that the building was erected in 1909 and first occupied by Dr. Whitley, it is possible that the building may have been constructed and occupied earlier by his predecessor Dr. John McCamie DeArmon (1857-1945), Mint Hill’s first physician. Educated at Rutherford and Yadkin Colleges, DeArmon received his medical degree in 1886 from the Baltimore Medical College (now part of the University of Maryland). Later that year, upon the advice of his father, a farmer in the Mallard Creek area, DeArmon moved to Mint Hill to start the town’s first medical practice.
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During his twenty-one year stay in Mint Hill, DeArmon married Susie Eliza Wolfe (1868-1944) and raised twelve children in a modest home located on a ten-acre parcel on what is now Fairview Road (N.C. 218). Over time, he developed a larger medical practice in Charlotte, and in 1907 moved with his family to the bigger city. A former president of the Mecklenburg County Medical Society, DeArmon continued to practice until the age of seventy-five.
For nearly a year, Mint Hill was without a resident physician until Dr. Whitley, a twenty-four-year old native of Union County, came to town to begin his practice. Like DeArmon, Whitley also attended Rutherford College and Baltimore Medical College. Arriving in October 1908 with a nine-day-old baby, Whitley and his wife Esther (1884-1987) first took up residence across the road from the ten-acre DeArmon place before buying the property the following year. It is believed that the office building was constructed shortly after the Whitleys moved to the DeArmon property, as DeArmon had previously used a back corner room of the family home as an office. The detached office building stood some forty feet from the house and featured three rooms: a reception/waiting room in the front half, and two examining rooms in the back. In addition to seeing patients in the office, Whitley made house calls using a one-horse buggy and later a motorcycle. Because the motorcycle’s bumpy ride apparently broke too many medicine bottles, Whitley ended up using an automobile to visit patients.
Whitley served the needs of his Mint Hill-area patients for nearly forty years. He also set up offices in Concord and Monroe, mixed his own medicines, made house calls 24 hours a day, and delivered 6,784 babies, including twelve of his own children. Esther, a native of Chesterfield County, South Carolina, occasionally helped her husband in his practice. Although lacking formal medical training, she assisted with suturing incisions, pulling teeth, administering anesthesia, and delivering babies. She is reported to have delivered thirty-six babies under her husband’s supervision, and two others by herself. Three generations of the Whitley family owned the property before donating the office building to the Mint Hill Historical Society in 1986 to be moved to its present location for restoration.