Charlotte, North Carolina: A Queen's Name, Twice Over
Charlotte, North Carolina, is named for a queen, and so is the county it sits in: Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who married King George III in 1761. The settlers used her first name for the town and her homeland for the county.
A princess from a small German duchy
D. A. Tompkins, who also wrote books on cotton mills, published a two-volume history of Mecklenburg County in Charlotte in 1903, and he starts the story in Germany. There were two little duchies called Mecklenburg, he explains, and from Mecklenburg-Strelitz “in the year 1761, went a young princess to be the wife of George the Third and Queen of England, and her name was Charlotte.”
The news reached the North Carolina backcountry just as settlers were splitting the county of Anson in two. “The new county was named Mecklenburg in honor of the queen who had come from old Mecklenburg, in Germany,” Tompkins writes, “and to do her still more honor, they called their town Charlotte.” Henry Gannett’s 1905 place-name book agrees on both counts. Charlotte, he says, was “named for the wife of George III of England,” and Mecklenburg County for “the Queen of George III, Charlotte of Mecklenburg.”
So if you’re driving through Charlotte in Mecklenburg County, you’re getting the same woman twice.
A courthouse first, a town later
The county came first, in December 1762. The town took a few more years and a fight. Tompkins says that in late 1765 Henry Eustace McCulloh gave 360 acres to three commissioners, Thomas Polk among them, to hold for a courthouse, a jail and stocks. People in the Rocky River settlements wanted the courthouse closer to them, and bills went back and forth in the Assembly.
As it turns out, Charlotte’s backers settled it with carpentry. They built a courthouse at their own expense where Trade and Tryon streets crossed, a long building on 10-foot pillars with a market underneath. Tompkins thinks the county seat “would have been located elsewhere had there not been a court house already built in Charlotte.” The law that made Charlotte a legal town passed in November 1768.
The king’s town that turned on the king
Tompkins couldn’t resist a little irony. He calls Charlotte the “Queen City” in 1903 and imagines how pleased King George must have been with such loyal subjects. Then he adds: “It was his own fault if he afterwards had cause to change his mind about them.”
The town’s school shows which way the wind was blowing. In 1771 the colonial Assembly chartered Queen’s College in Charlotte, Tompkins says, and in 1773 word came that the king had disallowed the charter. Local people kept the school going as Queen’s Museum, and around 1776 it took a new name: Liberty Hall Academy. The college dropped the queen. The town, you’ll notice, never did.
Sources & further reading
- D. A. Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg County and the City of Charlotte, vol. 1 (1903). The princess from Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the county and the town named for her, and “It was his own fault” (pp. 28–29); the county act of December 1762 (p. 29); McCulloh’s 360 acres, the courthouse at Trade and Tryon, and the town law of November 1768 (pp. 31–32); Queen’s College, Queen’s Museum and Liberty Hall Academy (pp. 72–73).
- Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). Charlotte, “named for the wife of George III of England” (p. 76); Mecklenburg County, named for “the Queen of George III, Charlotte of Mecklenburg” (p. 204).
- GNIS feature 1019610 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Charlotte, with its official name and location.
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