The west side neighborhood that made history

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Editor’s note: Charlotte is a city of nearly 200 neighborhoods. Each boasts its own unique history, and today, we continue our occasional series called “Love Thy Neighborhood” that explains how they shaped what the Queen City is today.

by John Short

Tucked away on the west side of Charlotte sits a neighborhood that, at first glance, fulfills the promises of the New South. In Seversville, walking along the Stewart Creek Greenway, you can take in uptown’s skyline from less than a mile away, steps from a recently redeveloped former textile mill and the old rail lines that once connected uptown to its doorstep. The neighborhood itself features mill-era cottages and craftsman bungalows, alongside brand-new townhomes at brand-new price points. 

But under the New South veneer sits a community that carries the name of a Confederate veteran, saw the early rumblings of organized labor conflict and became the catalyst for a landmark Civil Rights Supreme Court battle for school integration.

Seversville draws its name from Heinrich Severs, a Bavarian-born merchant, who brought his family to Charlotte around 1850. His son, Henry C. “Squire” Severs, was born at sea in 1842 off the coast of Charleston but grew up in Charlotte. After graduating from school, Henry traveled to Salisbury and found himself fighting for the Confederacy in a number of battles of the Civil War, during which he was described by a fellow soldier as “another brave Mecklenburg boy.” 

After the war, Henry returned to Charlotte, where he operated a successful general store and served the city as justice of the peace. The family had acquired land west of the city, and Henry helped develop much of it and was rumored to know the price of every plot of land in the city.

Severs would live in Charlotte until his untimely death in 1915 in a train accident, and is buried at Elmwood Cemetery in a distinctive log-cabin gravestone.

The early days of Seversville were quiet as the neighborhood sat squarely on the outskirts of town, but the community found a new momentum when Charlotte expanded its electric streetcar network west from the city’s downtown core, connecting the “ring village” to the city grid during the early 1900s. The streetcar connection enabled residents to commute into the central business and retail district, making it an attractive neighborhood for working-class families priced out of the emerging Dilworth, Elizabeth and Plaza Midwood streetcar suburb neighborhoods as Charlotte’s textile and manufacturing industries grew in the early 20th century.

In 1916, the Savona Mill opened the Weave Mill operation within the Seversville neighborhood, giving the community an industrial anchor. Selected for its location right along the tracks of the Piedmont and Northern Railway that ran next to Stewart Creek, the mill was ideally situated to accommodate rail cars that delivered cotton to be processed into textiles. The mill quickly became the center of life in the neighborhood, running over 18,000 spindles and employing over 500 people at its peak in 1925 after the addition of the Spinning Mill in 1921.

Despite the growth and economic success of the textile industry in Charlotte, life for the working-class textile workers of Seversville was hard and demanding. Though textile worker unions struggled to organize in North Carolina during the textile industry heyday, the Savona Mill was the site of one of Charlotte’s earliest textile labor disputes.

During the summer of 1919, mill ownership refused to allow a textile workers’ organizing group to hold a conference at the property. The conflict resulted in a six-week workers’ strike, an early tremor of regional labor strife that would echo in 1921 with strikes in Charlotte, Concord and Kannapolis, including the Chadwick-Hoskins, Johnston and Highland Park Mills in Charlotte, and the bloody Loray Mill strike in Gastonia in 1929.

While textile production at the mill ended in 1934, the mill was converted to a box-making facility run by the Old Dominion Box Co., which operated on the site until the 1990s. The Savona Mill building powered an economic engine in Seversville long after the regional textile boom collapsed.

During the Box Co. era, the character of the neighborhood shifted from textile mill life centered on white mill workers to a destination for Charlotte’s Black community that settled in the westside neighborhoods.

While Johnson C. Smith University in neighboring Biddleville had served as a center of gravity for the Black intellectual elite well before the extension of the rail line, Seversville and the west side of Charlotte experienced an influx of Charlotte’s Black population during the era of urban renewal that began in the early 1960s. When the destruction of the Brooklyn neighborhood in the Second Ward forced out roughly 7,000 Black residents from 1961 to 1970, many of the displaced families settled in Seversville and Biddleville, as well as nearby McCrorey Heights, Smallwood and Wesley Heights.

This changing racial makeup of the Seversville neighborhood leapt to the national stage in 1964, when residents Darius and Vera Swann asked the school board to enroll their 6-year-old son, James, at the nearby Seversville Elementary School, which was much closer to their home, rather than attending the all-Black Biddleville Elementary School some distance away. Despite the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that ended the “separate but equal” doctrine in 1954, the board refused the family’s request.

The Swann family enlisted a talented young lawyer named Julius Chambers, the first Black editor-in-chief of the University of North Carolina law review, to take their case, and he filed a lawsuit, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, that would be successfully argued all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1971, the Supreme Court upheld Judge James McMillan's busing order, making Charlotte a national model. But in 1999, a federal court ended race-based school assignment, and the neighborhoods the courts had never integrated proved far harder to change.

Outside the national headlines and courtrooms, life in Seversville during the latter half of the 20th century faced a pattern of decline similar to other communities near the city’s core. With widespread adoption of automobiles and cheap, plentiful land pushing economic activity to the suburbs, investment in the ring villages around the city’s core declined.

A 1985 city of Charlotte study found that almost half of the commercial buildings in the West End corridor were deteriorated, languishing as modern life in Charlotte buzzed in the suburbs.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, legacy Black residents and the Seversville Community Organization fought tirelessly to stabilize the area, pushing back against rising crime and holding absentee landlords accountable for deteriorating mill homes.

Local leaders advocated for the neighborhood, including Wallace Pruitt, known to neighbors as “The Mayor of Seversville,” who lobbied city and county leaders for neighborhood improvements. The Wallace Pruitt Recreation Center at 501 S. Bruns Ave. bears his name following a 2009 dedication ceremony after neighbors petitioned the Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation to memorialize his advocacy for community investments in neighborhood gathering places.

Seversville’s next chapter is actively being written in the present day. In 2021, the Phase 2 expansion of the Lynx Gold Line brought the streetcar through the historic Five Points neighborhood to French Street, bringing transportation and connectivity back to Seversville’s doorstep.

The Savona Mill is under active redevelopment, with a master plan that includes 200,000 sq. ft. of office space, a plaza on the Stewart Creek Greenway and more than 600 apartments. The plans call for a new food hall called Savona Food Works, currently planned for 2027 in the historic Weave building, with about 25 food stalls and a rooftop bar — the type of ambitious private investment that the neighborhood hasn’t seen since the mill’s heyday.

Since its founding, Seversville’s fortunes have followed whatever lay beside it: a railroad, a textile mill, an interstate and a greenway. Now, the mill, the streetcar and the skyline are drawing Charlotte back west, along with higher property taxes and the possibility that the families who held the neighborhood together will not be the ones who stay to see its next chapter. Seversville has waited at the edge of the city before.

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.

Today's supporting sponsor is Trinity Episcopal School. Trinity Episcopal School is holding K-8 Open Houses to learn more about its academic program and its community of curious learners and leaders.

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