W. T. Alexander House

William married four times. His first wife, Mary Hunter, whom he married in 1824, died in 1831. He married Margaret M. Harris in 1833. Following her death six years later, William married Mary J. Orr, who passed away in 1842. His fourth and final wife, Margery Helen Cochran, whom he wed in 1846, survived William by some forty years and lived in the Alexander House until 1910. The four marriages yielded thirteen children who assisted their father in working the fields and administering the plantation. However, enslaved labor performed much of the work cultivating William’s cash crops. By the start of the Civil War, William owned more than thirty enslaved persons, many of whom are buried in a cemetery now located off Mallard Creek Church Road. 

Emancipation proved to be ruinous for William, as much of his fortune had been invested in the acquisition of enslaved labor. The magnitude of his postwar financial loss, combined with his increasing dependence upon alcohol, left William with significant mental deterioration before his death in 1870. He was buried in the Mallard Creek Presbyterian Church Cemetery. Survived by only six children, William left the Alexander House and some 190 acres to the youngest boy, William Tasse Columbus Alexander (1861-1928), who later changed his legal name to William Tasse Alexander II.  

The younger William was a man of independent spirit, joining the Republican Party and thereby ostracizing himself from most of the Mallard Creek community. He married schoolteacher Mary Charlotte Watkins in 1898, and the couple had five children. The daughter of a newspaper columnist in Wadesboro, North Carolina, Mary devoted much of her life to educational pursuits, teaching in the public schools in Union County and Newell, North Carolina, for over twenty years. A member of the first graduation class at Greensboro’s Woman's College, she continued coursework at Queens College, Montreat College, Peace College and Davidson College well after her ninetieth birthday. In 1957, Mary donated five acres of land to Charlotte College for use as a road to the college campus. That main thoroughfare onto the UNC-Charlotte campus is named Mary Alexander Boulevard in her honor. She died in 1964 and is buried along with her husband at the Mallard Creek Presbyterian Church. 

Farming operations ended on the homeplace in 1952. In 1960, Mary granted the Alexander House and 77 acres of land to the children of her son William Tasse Alexander III. The youngest William long directed the activities of the Alexander Tank and Equipment Company and ran unsuccessfully for the State Senate in 1958.