Setting Charlotte's history in stone

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by John Short

For a quarter century, dozens of gravestones belonging to Charlotte’s earliest residents sat in a municipal warehouse. Alongside them was an ornate cast-iron fountain that for decades had served as the centerpiece of the city’s oldest municipal burial ground. 

Now, both are coming home.

Thanks to the efforts of a small group of Charlotte preservationists, up to 70 of the stones and the fountain are returning to Settlers’ Cemetery on Fifth Street in uptown, across from First Presbyterian Church.

The stones were removed in 1999 as part of a city effort to refurbish the cemetery as an accessible urban park. What began as a relocation took more than two decades, with the markers sitting inside a storage facility, in neat rows of wooden pallets.

In 2022, the Historic Elmwood Pinewood Inc., or HEPI, began organizing the resources needed to assess, catalog and eventually restore the gravestones.

In a city that has repeatedly torn down and remade its built environment, the return of the stones and fountain restores a physical connection to Charlotte’s past that had disappeared. HEPI has raised more than $100,000 in community contributions and worked with preservation specialists to restore and reset 28 of the historic markers. Another 13 are slated for reinstallation. 

The remaining stones will be assessed individually to determine whether they can be restored. Some, preservationists have discovered, may be beyond repair because of decades of degradation.

As the stones return, the cemetery becomes something closer to an open-air archive: a public record of the families, ambitions and legacies of an era when Charlotte was a backcountry settlement on the Carolina frontier. 

Settlers’ Cemetery is nearly as old as Charlotte itself. Although formally established as the town’s first municipal cemetery in 1815, the site was used as a burial ground as far back as 1776 and closed to new burials in 1867. Prominent Charlotte surnames like Polk, Davidson, Wilkinson and Caldwell dot the headstones of the cemetery.

The gravestones aren’t the only pieces of the cemetery’s past making a return. At the center of the grounds stands another recently restored landmark: a cast-iron fountain. The fountain’s own history predates its arrival at Settlers’ Cemetery by over a century. 

The fountain’s origins can be traced to a cemetery in Salisbury nearly 200 years ago. By the middle of the 20th century, the fountain was purchased as an antique by Ann Quarles of Charlotte, a colorful social hostess known for extravagant holiday parties who displayed the fountain prominently outside her family’s home along Providence Road.

As part of Charlotte Mayor Victor Shaw’s efforts to revitalize the Old Settlers’ Cemetery in 1957, the Quarles family donated the fountain to the cemetery beautification initiative. Crews sandblasted and restored the cast iron, painted the fountain silver and installed it in a new basin at the center of the cemetery, where water cascaded through its tiers.

Those rules address concerns around ongoing maintenance, filtration and liability of the structure, adding complications to balancing the full restoration of the fountain with modern municipal standards (and operational cost considerations). HEPI is asking the city to treat the fountain as a historic exception, allowing water and electrical service to be restored so it can operate as it did for decades as a public water feature.

For now, the fountain stands once again in Settlers’ Cemetery, still dry but finally out of storage. Nearly two centuries after its story began, and more than 25 years after it disappeared from public view, one of Charlotte’s historic landmarks is home again. Around it, the gravestones of Charlotte’s founding families are slowly returning one by one.

In a city accustomed to watching its past disappear, this time a historic artifact has made a comeback.

John Short is a freelance writer, co-host of The Charlotte Podcast and a member of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission who loves digging up Charlotte’s past and pondering its future. Say hey when you see him on the streetcar.

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Today’s Charlotte Ledger is sponsored by Atrium Health Levine Children’s. Since 2007, Atrium Health Levine Children’s has led the Carolinas in children’s care – helping reimagine the future of pediatrics nationwide.

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