He was a backcountry trailblazer

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by John Short

Who were the first Charlotteans?

If you ignore the indigenous tribes who gathered at the Big Rock in what is now Ballantyne, or the Catawba Nation, or the early Spanish expeditions who made camps around Gastonia or the handful of other European settlers who were likely in the area, the obvious answer is Thomas Spratt. 

For decades, the popular lore held that the Spratt family, led by Thomas Spratt Jr. and Sr., were the first white settlers to cross the Yadkin River on a wheeled wagon to settle in the area. While the Spratts may not have been the first European settlers in the area, it’s undeniable that they were among the most important families and founding fathers of modern-day Charlotte.

The senior Thomas Spratt was born around 1685 in either Scotland or Ireland (records were shoddy), and made the arduous journey across the Atlantic in the early 1730s. Spratt Sr.’s wife, Mary Clark Spratt, gave birth to Thomas Jr. during the voyage, a feat which probably deserves more recognition than the settlement of the Carolina backcountry. Once they arrived in the New World, the Spratt clan settled around modern-day Cumberland County, Pa. 

Eventually, the Spratts migrated south from Pennsylvania down the Great Wagon Road, in search of better weather, a lower cost of living and fertile land. Their desire to move south was likely also informed by a broader trend around the southern migration of “Ulster Scots,” of which the Spratts were a part, in which Scots-Irish immigrants to the colonies arrived to find that the religious environment of the Quaker and Amish communities in Pennsylvania was more restrictive than the independence-minded Scots-Irish were seeking. 

This quest for liberty, along with escalating frontier raids by native tribes that preceded the French and Indian War, prompted many Scots-Irish, led by their Presbyterian ministers, to organize southern migrations to western parts of Virginia, and ultimately, the backcountry of the Carolinas.

For the Spratts, this journey was down the Great Wagon Road to the present-day intersection of Randolph and Caswell roads, where the Novant Health Presbyterian Hospital complex sits today. Father and son Spratt grew their community during the late 1740s and early 1750s, along with a few other Scots-Irish families in the region. 

Notably, Thomas Polk had followed the Spratts down from Pennsylvania in the romantic pursuit of Susannah Spratt, Thomas Jr.’s sister, whom he married in 1755. In the early 1750s, the Spratts and other founding families spread throughout the region, seeking arable land on which to farm wheat (more profitable at the time than corn), and attempting to tame the wild land of the backcountry.

Upon Thomas Spratt Sr.’s death in 1757, the younger Thomas Spratt inherited a plantation the family had established on the north side of Twelve Mile Creek, near present-day Fort Mill. It was on this land that Thomas Spratt Jr. established the key alliance in Charlotte’s founding history, with the recently elected “King” Haigler of the Catawba tribe. Haigler had inherited a Catawba tribe facing turmoil from disease (smallpox brought by European settlers), conflict with other native tribes and steady encroachment on tribal lands by European settlers.

Opting for a strategic alliance rather than opening a new front of conflict, Haigler and Spratt joined forces to protect the region around the strategic trade choke point of Nation Ford, an important crossing point along the Great Wagon Road at the Catawba River. This alliance prevented the region from becoming another frontier war zone during the years when neighboring tribes and colonial settlements often violently clashed.

Over the years, this alliance strengthened through trade and dealings with the English government, in particular the signing of the Treaty of Pine Tree Hill, which gave the Catawba 225 square miles of land along the Catawba River in 1760, including a 99-year (and later 999-year) lease brokered in part by Spratt as an intermediary. Spratt's inherited land at Twelve Mile Creek was within the southern edge of this land grant, meaning that on paper, Spratt leased the land from the Catawba.

Spratt remained a loyal partner to the Catawba even after King Haigler’s assassination by the Shawnee in 1763. In 1774, Spratt would earn the nickname “Kanawha” from the Catawba, a reference to the Kanawha River in present-day West Virginia, where Spratt joined the Catawba in fighting a battle against the Shawnee in that area. It’s a testament to the alliance that Spratt would leave his settled home in the backcountry to fight alongside the Catawba in their battle in West Virginia.

After King Haigler’s assassination, the Spratt alliance remained with the Catawba via Sally New River — the grandniece of King Haigler, who, as part of the Catawba’s matrilineal society, made her one of the principal female landholders and leaders within the Catawba tribe. The Spratt family lived near Sally and served as trusted legal and business advisers to her and the tribe in the face of accelerating European settlement in the region.

With the alliance in place and managed, the Spratts and other founding families set about establishing the formal administration of their community. The collection of family farms in the area during the late 1740s and early 1750s would eventually become “Charlotte Town,” so named in 1768 to honor King George’s wife Charlotte. In 1762, the royal bureaucracy in London chartered “Mecklenburg” as a county carved out from Anson County, with local government organized in part by Spratt shortly thereafter. 

Thomas Polk, now years into being Thomas Spratt’s brother-in-law, was the chairman of the Mecklenburg Committee of Safety, which formally met at a sturdy log cabin on land that Polk had acquired just up the road from the original Spratt settlement at Randolph and Caswell, at the crossroads of the Great Wagon Road and the “Great Warriors Path,” an ancient Indian trading path. This intersection would become the modern intersection of Trade and Tryon streets in uptown, where the eventual settlement and county seat would be granted by the English government in 1768, the official founding of Charlotte. 

With Charlotte established as a small but recognized outpost in colonial America, Thomas Spratt and his Catawba compatriots would again be called to defend the region during the Revolutionary War. Thomas would host Gen. Thomas Sumter's militia during the British Southern Campaign, and recruit Catawba tribal warriors as scouts and infantry, as Sumter and pro-independence militias harassed British and Loyalist forces across the backcountry. 

After the Revolution, Spratt lived peacefully on his land in Twelve Mile Creek, serving as an important founding father of Charlotte’s burgeoning bureaucracy and a friend and adviser to the Catawba until he died in 1807. He was buried at the Spratt Family Cemetery in Fort Mill, now preserved within the Anne Springs Close Greenway, near the Nation Ford roadbed so important to Spratt’s early relations with the Catawba. 

Interestingly, a 2007 renovation at what’s now known as Atrium Health Mercy on Randolph Road uncovered a Revolutionary War-era burial ground, which was revealed to include 13 colonial grave markers bearing the years 1771 to 1778, with names such as Barnet, Bingham and Sprot (Spratt). The graves were moved and reburied at the historic Steele Creek Presbyterian Church cemetery where they sit today.

Centuries after his death, Thomas Spratt stands as an original founding father of Charlotte, with a legacy that highlights his ability to operate between worlds, succeeding in the settlement of the backcountry by building enduring relationships with the people already there. Spratt’s direct descendants remain in the area, including long-serving South Carolina Congressman John Spratt, and countless other families in the region. 

The Spratt family’s legacy, from a journey from Pennsylvania down the Great Wagon Road, grew into a lineage that brokered the borderlands of the Catawba Nation, informed the transportation grid of modern-day Charlotte and established the community as the capital of Carolina’s Piedmont.

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.

Related Historical Heavyweights profiles by John Short:

➡️ You can read about two dozen notable Charlotte historical figures on our Historical Heavyweights page.

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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