The History of the Belmont Community
The Belmont area's origin is unlike most other neighborhoods in Charlotte. It was built up around the turn of the century beyond the northern rim of Charlotte's nineteenth century boundary. Although the area was distinctly suburban in location and well served by streetcars, it was not built as a middle and upper income "streetcar suburb" like the contemporaneous neighborhoods of Dilworth, Elizabeth, Wesley Heights or Wilmore, among others. And although it contained textile mill housing, it was not the typical company-owned mill village found on the edges of Charlotte and other southern cities in the period.
The area's residents were almost without exception blue-collar workers and their families. A few seem to have used the Brevard, Pegram, or Plaza streetcars which served the neighborhood to commute to jobs elsewhere in the city. But most walked to work in one of the textile mills or related industries that came to line the railroads.
Though the area has no residences built for the rich and powerful, and no structures except churches designed as showy pieces of architecture, it is not without historic sites. The Alpha Mill at Twelfth and Brevard streets is one of the city's earliest and best-preserved textile plants, an early work of industrial innovator D.A. Tompkins.
Adjacent to the mill on Calvine and Caldwell streets is a cluster of Alpha Mill cottages, Charlotte's oldest surviving mill village. Several blocks of privately-developed housing near Belmont Avenue contain interesting examples of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century popular residential design. The 1000 block of Harrill Street in particular comprises one of Charlotte's last well-preserved collections of Victorian architecture.
The area's value goes beyond these specific architectural and historical high points. The Belmont-Villa Heights-Optimist Park area was Charlotte's first entirely working-class suburban district. 3 As such, it is an important reminder of this large group of people who with their labor helped advance Charlotte to its position as a leading textile producer and the largest city in North and South Carolina during the textile boom decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
by Dr. Tom Hanchett, based of excerpts from the Historic Landmarks Commission