💎 Telling Charlotte's complete story

Good morning! Today is Thursday, July 9, 2026. You’re reading The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C.

Today’s Charlotte Ledger special series “Hidden Gems” is sponsored by Foundation for the Carolinas. For over six decades, Foundation for the Carolinas has helped people and organizations create more good, more easily and effectively. Learn how at fftc.org.

You know those places you've always meant to visit — the ones that have been around for years but rarely make headlines? They remind us of our history — good and bad — our remarkable achievements, the glories of nature, and, sometimes, they make us look at ourselves in new and occasionally weird ways.

In this series, longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman visits five overlooked Mecklenburg County destinations that deserve a spot on your summer itinerary. Here are places Toppman has already covered in this week’s series:

by Lawrence Toppman

When I visited the Charlotte Museum of History last month, most people were goggling at “American Revolution: The Augmented Exhibition,” which brings our colonial crisis to multimedia life. I eventually did, too. But first, I stepped outside to a deserted pavilion behind the main building to see the American Freedom Bell.

The bronze bell, dedicated 26 years ago with the motto “Never forget that you are free” and symbolically pesky hornets on its surface, stands 7 feet tall and wide and weighs 7.5 tons. You can rap it with your knuckles, as I did the Liberty Bell on an eighth-grade school trip, and no guards will scream at you. And if you look to one side of the pavilion, you find the names of 18 people who never had any freedom to cherish: the enslaved property of Hezekiah Alexander, whose homesite this was when independence beckoned in the 1770s.

That’s a great thing about this museum: In an era when many politicians try to erase unpleasant incidents in America’s past, the CMH celebrates greatness without flinching from ugliness. It acknowledges not only the Scots-Irish landowners who exercised the greatest control over the region but also the Catawba Indians who lived alongside them and the Africans imported to make white prosperity possible.

The CMH justly touts “American Revolution,” which will be here through April 2027, as its main current attraction. By using a Histopad (an essential $5 add-on), you can approach the exhibit on two levels, studying the panoramas and wall text without the pad but then hovering over QR codes to go down countless historical rabbit holes.

The “You are there!” element allows you to be present at the signing of the Declaration of Independence or cross the Delaware River with George Washington. Yet this college history major found the less-familiar byways most intriguing.

I knew little about the disastrous Battle of Fort Necessity, which opened the French and Indian War in 1754. Lieutenant Colonel Washington, a relative novice, built a fort so close to the woods that the enemy could pop out and attack his men, then dash back into hiding — a technique General Washington used to his advantage 20 years later.

I marveled at Henry Knox slogging with five dozen cannons from Fort Ticonderoga in New York through mountain passes in the snowy Berkshires down to Cambridge, Mass., only to see the British bolt from the city when he got there without firing a shot.

The exhibit has been divided into a national side and a side devoted to North and South Carolina. In the latter, you’ll learn about the surprisingly pivotal Battle of Kings Mountain, a decisive victory for the colonists in 1780, and see a recreation of “uptown” Charlotte at the time, complete with a trading post literally in the intersection of Trade and Tryon Streets. (No churches, though.)

But because every Histopad revelation leads to a dozen other choices, my brain filled up quickly. I preferred to honor the semiquincentennial (a clunky word meaning “halfway to the 500th anniversary”) by taking a walk in the woods.

The path leads past a statue that might have looked like Alexander surveying his property and runs to the Rock House, the 1774 structure he built at the apex of his 600 acres. (There are many “might haves” associated with Alexander; much of the furniture in the house has been re-created and placed where it might have been used, according to historical research.)

The genial guides don’t harangue us about racism, but any sentient visitor will contrast the spacious, well-lit offices and bedrooms of the Rock House with the cramped, airless kitchen. The Springhouse, where fresh water still runs today — though hardly so in drought conditions — provides a brief, cool respite, and an herb garden makes the air fragrant nearby.

When I came to Charlotte 46 years ago, people stereotyped the CMH as a musty preserver of the distant past. That’s no longer true, if it ever was. The museum relocated the Siloam School to its grounds and renovated it for a 2024 opening; it’s one of the community’s last Rosenwald Schools, part of a pre-Depression project between Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenthal and African-American leader Booker T. Washington to educate Black children in the Jim Crow South.

Meanwhile, the CMH rotates exhibits in its upstairs galleries. “Captured in Cartoons” runs through fall, depicting 200 years of Charlotte’s history through comics, cartoons and animation; it’s mostly a homage to the stingingly bipartisan wit of Kevin Siers, formerly The Charlotte Observer’s Pulitzer-winning cartoonist — one of the last practitioners of a dying art in a struggling industry.

I look forward to “Pleibol! In the Barrios and the Big Leagues,” which opens July 18 to remind us of the contributions of Latina baseball players. Unfortunately, it’ll oust the delightful “Path of Portraits Reimagined,” a collection of paintings that honor local figures from the obscure — Nance, a mother of three whom Alexander bequeathed to his daughter as a wedding present — to the prominent, a woman named Sarii who became the Catawba Nation’s largest landowner and protected her homelands from European settlement in the 18th century.

The name “Alexander” shows up twice in this Path of Portraits. African-American soldier Zechariah Alexander founded the famous Charlotte funeral home bearing his name and a dynasty of social and political leaders, while flamboyant white drag artist Brandy Alexander became an early advocate for LGBTQ rights in North Carolina in the 1970s.

Any museum with room enough for Hezekiah, Zechariah and Brandy can never be accused of stodginess or narrow focus. Putting them together in a historical melting pot reminds us what America is intended to be.

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for The Charlotte Ledger’s Toppman on the Arts newsletter.

Here’s a hint: You might not see yourself the same way after visiting this uptown place.