First United Methodist Church has held this uptown corner as one of the pillars of Charlotte's religious landscape since the 1830s. Methodist circuit riders reached Mecklenburg County in the late eighteenth century, and the congregation that would become First Methodist was formally organized in 1832. Methodism offered something different from the Calvinist Presbyterianism that dominated early Charlotte — a warmer evangelical theology, open revival meetings, and a strong emphasis on personal conversion and moral reform.
The church drew members from the growing middle class of merchants and tradespeople, and its social programs — Sunday schools, temperance societies, charitable organizations — shaped the city's civic culture throughout the nineteenth century. The present building, a substantial stone structure with a commanding corner presence in uptown, reflects the congregation's long prosperity. Like all of Charlotte's uptown churches, First Methodist navigated the upheavals of the Civil War, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement, and the dramatic transformation of uptown from a residential and commercial neighborhood into a financial district.
The congregation has remained here as the city changed entirely around it.