Iron fences ring the oldest burial ground in Charlotte, where you now stand, established around 1776 as the town's first public cemetery. The graves here predate the United States itself. Many of the Scots-Irish Presbyterians who settled Mecklenburg County and signed the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence in May 1775 — asserting freedom from Britain a full year before Philadelphia — are buried within these iron fences.
The stones are modest, many of them sandstone that has weathered nearly to illegibility over two and a half centuries. Revolutionary War veterans, early merchants, ministers, and their families lie here in quiet contrast to the bank towers that rise on three sides. The cemetery survived every wave of urban development that swept away almost everything else from Charlotte's first century.
Look at the oldest markers near the center and notice the carved symbols: winged hourglasses, skulls, willow branches — the visual vocabulary of eighteenth-century death. Charlotte's founding generation is here, pressed into the Piedmont red clay, a few minutes' walk from where they built their courthouse and their town.