History of Mecklenburg County and the City of Charlotte; From 1740 to 1903 Volume 1 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. BEGINNING OP CHARLOTTE. (1762 to 1772.) Influences Which Tended to the Necessity for a Town?Difficulty in Obtaining a Charter?The First Court House?Laws of the New Town. Mecklenburg county, as at first constituted, contained all of .the present county, Cabarrus, Gaston, Lincoln and a part of Union. The total area was four or five times as great as it is today. In 1766, the population of Mecklenburg was about five thousand, and this grew to six thousand within the next two years. Increase in population and development of the natural resources were rapid and continuous after government was firmly established. In the latter part of 1765, Henry Eustace McCulloh donated a tract of three hundred and sixty acres of land to John Frohock, Abraham Alexander and Thomas Polk, as commissioners, to hold in trust for the county of Mecklenburg, on which to erect a court house, prison and stocks. McCulloh was the agent of Augustus Selwyn, who owned several immense tracts of land on a grant from the king, making it obligatory upon him to settle them with an average of one person to every two hundred acres. He foresaw that the interests of his employer would be advanced by the location of the county seat on his land. The courts before this time had been held at Spratts, just outside the present city limits, and as the proposed town was near the centre of the county, circumstances were apparently favorable to his plans, but objection was made by the people in the Rocky river section, who desired the court house to be located nearer to them. The first representatives of Mecklenburg in the General Assembly were Martin Phifer, from Rocky river; and Thomas Polk, who favored the new town. In 1766, Mr.Phifer introduced a bill to enable the commissioners of Charlotte to lay off th...