Twin brick towers rise over you at St. Peter's, the oldest Catholic parish in Charlotte, founded in 1851 to serve the Irish and German immigrants who arrived with the railroad. Before the railroad came through in 1852, Charlotte was a modest courthouse town of a few hundred people. The Western North Carolina Railroad changed everything, and with the laborers who built it came Catholic immigrants, enough to establish this parish on what was then the eastern edge of the settled town.
The present Romanesque Revival church, with its twin towers visible from several blocks in every direction, was completed in 1893. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Catholics were a small and sometimes suspect minority in this heavily Protestant Piedmont city, and St. Peter's was their anchor. The church sits now on a prominent block just steps from the Trade and Tryon crossroads, its brick towers a reminder that Charlotte's story includes many communities beyond its Scots-Irish Presbyterian founders.
The diocese that grew from this single parish now encompasses hundreds of thousands of Catholics across western North Carolina.