Thrift Depot of the Piedmont and Northern Railroad Company
(ca. 1911)
Designed by prominent Charlotte architect C. C. Hooks, the Thrift Depot is the last surviving station of Mecklenburg County’s once-thriving Piedmont and Northern Railroad Company.
8101 Old Mt Holly Rd, Charlotte, NC 28214
The Piedmont and Northern Railroad Company was formed in 1911 by the Southern Power Company. Headed by James B. Duke, the Southern Power Company already controlled the area’s electric utility industry and owned the Charlotte Electric Railway and other streetcar systems in several of the cities it served, making the P&N Railroad a natural extension of its existing business. The P&N Railroad contributed significantly to the industrial development of Mecklenburg and Gaston Counties and the overall economic growth of the Piedmont in the early twentieth century.
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The P&N project started in April 1911 with the construction of a twenty-one-mile route linking Charlotte and Gastonia, anchored by a freight depot and passenger station in uptown Charlotte. Southern hired prominent local architect Charles Christian Hook (1870-1938) to design the stations along the line. A native of Wheeling, West Virginia, Hook originally moved to Charlotte in 1891 to teach mechanical drawing in the city’s public schools, but soon became Charlotte’s first fulltime professional architect. Hook designed some 800 to 1,000 homes and buildings across the Carolinas, including Charlotte’s City Hall and federal courthouse, the Carolina Theater, Myers Park Elementary School, several fire stations, and many buildings on college campuses across North Carolina (including the Chapel Hill and Greensboro campuses of the University of North Carolina, Davidson College, N.C. State University, Duke University, and Queens University). Notably, Hook also designed James B. Duke’s Myers Park mansion.
Hook used a common design for the P&N Railroad stations incorporating elements of the Spanish Colonial architectural style, including a distinctive red Spanish tile roof with wide eaves supported by heavy wooden brackets. Originally known as Paw Creek, the Mecklenburg County village of Thrift was one of seven locations between Charlotte and Mount Holly to host a Hook-designed P&N Railroad station. The presence of the depot in Thrift prompted the construction of the nearby Thrift cotton mill (later known as the Kendall Mill). The Thrift Depot is the last surviving P&N Railroad station in Mecklenburg County.
The P&N Railroad prospered through two world wars and the Great Depression in part because it was specifically designed to interchange freight cars with steam railroads. Freight carriage proved critical to its continued success as the widespread ownership of automobiles that began in the 1920s caused a precipitous decline in the train passenger business. P&N Railroad ended its passenger service in 1951. A year earlier, the P&N board of directors also decided to convert to diesel locomotion, as electric railroad lines were no longer economically viable. In 1969, P&N Railroad merged with the Seaboard Coast Line, thereby formally ending the nearly sixty-year-old railroad line. In December 1969, about six months after its acquisition of the P&N Railroad, Seaboard discontinued use of the Thrift Depot as a railroad station, primarily due to the prior closure of the nearby Kendall Mill.