Ahead of you is the home congregation of Charlotte's founding generation. First Presbyterian Church traces its roots to 1821, though the Presbyterians who organized it had been worshipping in Mecklenburg County since the 1760s. The Scots-Irish settlers who built this town were overwhelmingly Presbyterian, and this church was the institutional heart of that community for its first century.
The congregation educated its children, arbitrated its disputes, and provided the moral framework — fierce, Calvinist, and frequently contentious — that shaped Charlotte's civic life. The church's graveyard holds many of the town's most prominent early families. The present Gothic Revival building dates from the late nineteenth century, its stone tower a landmark in the uptown streetscape.
During the Civil War the church served as a Confederate hospital. During the civil rights era its congregation wrestled publicly with the question of integration. Walk the perimeter, read the inscriptions on the older grave markers, and notice how this Victorian sanctuary now sits inside a forest of steel and glass.