William Lee House
(ca. 1828)
The William Lee family resided in this Sharon community plantation house for nearly 130 years.
6415 Gaywind Dr, Charlotte, NC 28226
The William Lee House is one of Mecklenburg County’s older plantation houses and the only extant plantation house in the county’s Sharon community. From 1794 through the 1820s, Irish immigrant William Lee, Sr. (1770-1828) acquired considerable acreage along McMichaels Creek in south-central Mecklenburg County to establish his plantation. Between 1810 and 1827, Lee also accumulated land for a plantation for his son, William Lee, Jr. (1802-1856), on McAlpine Creek in Sharon and Providence Townships.
Property Quick Links
The younger William married Mary Ann McKnight (1810-1851) in 1826 and established their residence on the McAlpine Creek plantation. They built the extant two-and-a-half-story frame house on top of a hill overlooking the Swan Run branch of the creek around 1828. The stagecoach line from Charlotte to Charleston ran on the adjacent road. By 1850, the Lees were a prosperous planter family with four children and real estate valued at $5,000. Much of the family’s prosperity stemmed from their use of enslaved labor. According to the 1850 census, William Jr. owned twenty-two enslaved persons, including fourteen children aged eighteen and younger. The following year, Mary Ann died after a prolonged illness at the age of forty-one. William Jr. followed his wife in death five years later.
In 1857, following her father’s death, Jane Lee Alexander (1835-1907), her husband John O. Alexander (1832-1912), and their family moved into the William Lee House, where they relied upon the involuntary labor of what appears to have been a family unit of five enslaved persons. The 1870 census, the first taken post-emancipation, suggests that the same formerly enslaved family continued to reside on the Lee family property, perhaps as tenant farmers. The William Lee estate, including some 180 acres, passed to Jane and John’s eldest child Marcellus Allan (M.A.) Alexander (1859-1933). He and wife Cora Brown Alexander (1861-1948) farmed the family land for many years, raising four children. Upon the deaths of M.A. and Cora, the house and nearly ten acres passed in 1950 to their only surviving son Clayton Brown Alexander (1889-1968), who had been blinded at age five in a wood-chopping accident. Despite his blindness, Clayton earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of North Carolina and taught history for several years at Catawba and Rutherford Colleges. In 1956, following careful restoration, Clayton and his wife Norma (1895-1968) sold the William Lee House, ending the Lee family’s nearly 130 years residency in the family home.