SYNOPSIS OF SIGNIFICANCE

The 1927 First National Bank Building located at 110 and 112 South Tryon Street is the tallest and one of the most prominent pre-World War II buildings in Charlotte.  The building was largely the result of two men, industrialist Henry M. McAden, the president of the bank from 1907 until its closing in 1930, and Louis Asbury, arguably Charlotte’s most prominent and important architect of the early 20^th century.  The twenty-story First National Bank Building was once the tallest building in the Carolinas and remained the tallest building in Charlotte for forty years.  The office building is a product of a short but important phase of the built environment of Charlotte and North Carolina.  From 1908 until the onset of the Great Depression, Charlotte led the Carolinas by embracing the building of high rises and skyscrapers. The building’s association with the now defunct First National Bank of Charlotte is significant, as that institution opened immediately after th Civil War and contributed to the phenomenal economic success that the city experienced during the late nineteenth century.  The building now holds an important place on the Square in Charlotte, and its presence does much to convey the historic nature of the Square as the commercial center of the city.

THE FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF CHARLOTTE

The First National Bank of Charlotte was established in 1865 by the well-connected New York-born Charlottean John Wilkes (1827-1908.)  John Wilkes was the son of New Yorker Charles Wilkes, a naval officer and explorer who achieved the rank of Rear Admiral in the Union Navy.  Following his father, John went to sea at the age of 14 and in 1847 was appointed to the Naval Academy.    In 1853 John Wilkes settled in Charlotte to oversee the family’s mining and milling operations.  The family had interest in the Capps Mining Company, and Charles Wilkes had been president of the St. Catherine's Mining Company.   John Wilkes married his cousin, Jane Renwick Smedberg of New York, who went on to become one of North Carolina’s most important medical philanthropists.   While his father served in the Union Navy during the Civil War, John Wilkes served the Confederacy.  He served in the Home Guard in Charlotte, and his Mecklenburg Flour Mills was a chief supplier for the Army of Northern Virginia. [1]  He signed over ownership of the Mecklenburg Iron Works (which he purchased in 1858) to the Confederate Government, and he and his brother Edmond directed wartime railroad construction in the South.   At the end of the war John Wilkes received a pardon directly from President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Henry Seward and quickly procured a charter for the First National Bank of Charlotte, the first national bank in the post-war South.  By December 15, 1865, John Wilkes had traveled to Baltimore to secure a deposit of $500.000 in US bonds. [2]  Also in 1865, First National Bank of Charlotte became the first bank in North Carolina to receive a charter to print national bank notes, a form of currency.[3]

This early establishment of a significant financial institution in Charlotte, a city that had survived the war physically intact with good rail connections to the rest of the country, along with a booming post-war national economy, surely contributed to the phenomenal growth of the city in the immediate years after the Civil War.  By 1870 the population was 4,473, double its pre-war number.  By 1871 three other banks had opened in Charlotte, and by 1872 the city added its fifth rail line.[4]  Despite his success with establishing the First National Bank of Charlotte, Wilkes was no longer president of the bank in 1867, and he faced financial ruin in 1869 with the failure of his woolen mill.  Undaunted, John Wilkes re-opened and made a success of the Mecklenburg Iron Works as a producer of industrial machinery. 

Ad for the John Wilkes's Mecklenburg Iron Works ca. 1880

Despite being an ardent Unionist before the Civil War, Rufus Y. McAden [5]  served in the state legislature during the War and became Speaker of the North Carolina House in 1866.   In 1867 he moved to Charlotte from Alamance County to become president of the First National Bank of Charlotte.  R. Y. McAden fit well into the progressive commercial climate of Charlotte.  In 1870 he became the Vice President of the Atlanta and Richmond Air-Line Railway Company, and in 1873 worked with the Southern Security Company to purchase the Spartanburg and Union Railroad.   In 1881 McAden built the McAden mills in Gaston County along the Atlanta line.  He also constructed a mill village there that came to be known as McAdenville.    Other prominent businessmen such W.R. Myers and Robert M. Oates also worked for the bank.   Oates became president in 1891. 

In 1907 Rufus Y. McAden’s son, Henry M. McAden, became president of the bank and remained in that position until the bank closed.   Henry McAden also succeeded his father as the owner of the McAden Mills and became president of the Piedmont Fire Insurance Company on South Tryon Street sometime after 1903.  The Piedmont Fire Insurance Company was a small yet profitable company fully owned by the directors of the company.[6]  This may have been an unfortunate model for Henry McAden to rely on when he began running of the much larger First National Bank of Charlotte.  As the last president of the First National Bank of Charlotte, Henry  McAden was responsible for the most prominent  and substantial of all artifacts of the failed bank, the twenty story skyscraper located just off of the Square. 

The Square and High Rise Buildings

The history of Charlotte is concretely linked with Independence Square (the Square), as the intersection pre-dates the city itself.  The Square was the site of the pre-colonial intersection of two major Native American trading paths which were used and expanded as white settlers moved into the area.  The Great Wagon Road, which stretched to northern Virginia, merged with the local trail called the Great Trading Path, and crossed through the middle of what is now Charlotte at the Square in the same manner as the north-south running Tryon Street.  The Tuckaseegee Trail, which lead to the only Colonial-era Catawba River crossing, crossed the Great Trading Path at the Square as the east-west running Trade Street now crosses the Square.  From the city’s earliest days the Square became a center of commerce.   A courthouse at the Square drew farmers, who when gathered had an opportunity to trade.[7]  As the city’s economy grew, first with the discovery of gold nearby in 1799 and then with the tremendous textile prosperity after the Civil War, the Square continued to be the economic center of the city.  Even after the coming of the railroads in 1852, when the transportation significance of the intersection was greatly diminished, the Square retained its position as the commercial center of the city.  

As a nineteenth-century walkable city, Charlotte's Square featured a concentration of multi-story brick commercial buildings with residences radiating out into the four wards.   Even with the coming of the streetcar era (1887-1938) which allowed neighborhoods and businesses to move away from the center of the city, the Square remained the center of commerce, with late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century insurance maps showing businesses such as banks, insurance offices, cotton brokers, and professional business offices concentrated around the square, interspersed with retail establishments.  From the late nineteenth-century into the early twentieth-century, as the city prospered, two, three, and four-story brick buildings filled the empty lots along Trade and Tryon streets, and also along College Street to the east of the Square.   Even as the density of commercial buildings around the Square continued to increase, the form and scale of the new buildings differed only slightly from the ante-bellum commercial buildings of Granite Row.  This trend changed drastically in 1908 with the opening of the 12-story Realty Building at the northwest corner of the Square, the first steel-farmed "skyscraper" built in the Carolinas.

1908 Realty Building

The Realty Building was followed in 1912 by the 12-story Commercial National Bank Building on South Tryon.  By the 1920s skyscrapers and other high-rises utilizing steel frame and concrete deck construction were transforming the skyline.  In 1922 work was begun on the twelve-story Hotel Charlotte, which was designed by New York architect William Lee Stoddart (1869-1940). Another Stoddart building, the 17-story Johnson Building on South Tryon, was begun in 1924 and was for a short time the tallest building in Charlotte.    

The Johnson Building was usurped by the 20-story First National Bank Building (1927) followed by the 10-story 100 room Mayfair Manor Hotel on North Tryon in 1929.  Other tall buildings such as the seven-story Builders Building and the five-story Addison Office Building and the Ivey’s and Efird’s Department Store building were also constructed within a few block of the square in the 1920s. 

First National Bank Building (1927)

Now eighty years old, in good condition, and serving its original function as a bank and office building, the First National Bank Building has survived longer than the institution that spawned it.  Ironically, the building itself may have had much to do with the failure of the bank. 

The old, three-story First National Bank Building was located on South Tryon near the Square.  It was similar to the other nineteenth-century two- and three-story brick buildings that crowded the Square and lined Tryon and Trade Streets.  Early in the bank's history Rufus McAden lived in the building with his family in the upper floors.[8]  Around 1925 Henry McAden tore down the old bank building and rebuilt on the same spot. 

While president of the First National Bank of Charlotte, Henry McAden hired Louis Asbury (1877-1975) in 1916 to design for him a large and handsome home in the Myers Park neighborhood.[9]  He must have been well satisfied.  Henry McAden could have chosen a New York architect, such as William Lee Stoddart, who had designed the Johnson Building, or the N.Y. firm of Hopkins & Dentz which specialized in bank architecture, but instead he chose Asbury to design the bank’s new twenty-story skyscraper, the tallest building in the state.

	Louis Asbury in 1915 Below is the 1917 Henry McAden House

Asbury graduated from Trinity College in 1900 and then received training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He returned to Charlotte in 1908 and established himself as an architect.  Asbury became the first North Carolina member of the American Institute of Architects and helped organize the first North Carolina Chapter of the A.I.A.  By 1913 Asbury was expanding his practice to include commercial designs.  That year he designed a new Neoclassical facade for the Southern Loan and Savings Bank on South Tryon Street.[10]  Ten years later his design for the large five-story Efrid’s Department Store was built as well as the eight-story Professional Building at 403 North Tryon.  By the late 1920s, Asbury was perhaps the most prolific Charlotte architect in terms of Uptown buildings with his First National Bank Building in 1927, the 1928 Mecklenburg County Courthouse, and the Mayfair Hotel in 1929.

In early 1925 Louis Asbury was at work on the First National Bank Building.  He did not work alone.  His partner in the project was the Lockwood, Green & Company, an international engineering firm that was active in building industrial structures in Charlotte such as the Textile Mill Supply Company Building located at 1300 South Mint Street.    The architect and engineering firm were to charge the owners 6% of the cost of the building, with each party receiving 3%.[11]   A March 3, 1925, memorandum explains that Asbury would produce sketch plans and construction plans while Lockwood, Greene would produce structural, heating and electrical plans.   Although they were being compensated equally, it was quite clear that Asbury, working closely with the owners, was in charge of the project.  Lockwood would solicit and receive bids which would then be approved by Asbury and the owners.

In addition to producing the design of the building, Asbury also oversaw the selection of all the materials from the stone cladding to the thermostat covers.  In a letter from March 1, 1927, Asbury writes to disappointed vendor, “I beg to advise that we do not favor the use of the Venetian Blinds.”  Another important part of his responsibilities was to oversee and endorse payments.  Asbury endorsed checks to Lockwood, Greene & Co. for as little at $460 and as great as $20,090, to pay the general contractor, the Hunkie-Conkie Company of Cleveland, Ohio as well as other vendors and subcontractors.

The relationship between Asbury and bank president Henry McAden must have remained good during the nearly three years it took to open the new building.  Asbury received a note dated September 2, 1927, stating the on “September 9^th we will open our new banking room, and as this is your building as well as ours, I hope you will help us make the opening a success.”[12] 

The opening of the First National Bank Building was promoted for weeks in the Charlotte newspapers.  Advertisements illustrated with drawings by Louis Asbury extolled the convenience and security of the new bank.  On the evening before the opening the Charlotte News ran a nearly full-page advertisement inviting the people of Charlotte to attend the opening: “see the beauty of architecture, the convenience of arrangement, and the extraordinary mechanical equipment of the new First National.”  The same advertisement ran the next day in the morning paper.  Perhaps because so many high rise buildings were erected in Charlotte during the 1920s, the opening of the tallest building in the state did not merit front page coverage in either paper.  But articles did run in both papers on Friday September 9, 1927, to announce the opening.  Both papers discussed the history of the bank, the height of the new building (250 feet) and the evening’s free musical performance.  On September 11^th  the Charlotte News ran a glowing editorial on the new building, proclaiming the First National Bank Building “a splendid, palatial thing.”  Referring to the bank’s and to the city’s modest beginnings, the paper boasted that Charlotte had “abundant (banking) resources and with an individual and composite strength that would be a credit to a city twice as large as this.”   The editors saw this new building as a testament to the faith that bankers had in the future of Charlotte:

Those now in charge of its destinies have been exhibited in tangible materials something of the prosperity it has been enjoying through the years and much of their own vision as to what this community and this section are to experience in earthly enrichment through the years that are to be.  They have leaped far into the future in the propulsion of this enterprise.  The tall and lovely brow of this gigantic edifice, the pride and ornament of Charlotte and of the Carolinas, stands to testify to their faith as much as to their immediate enterprise.

With the opening of the First National Bank Building came another event that seemed to be a harbinger of the rosy future for Charlotte’s banking industry in general, and of the First National Bank in particular.  Soon after the First National Bank Building opened in 1927, the Charlotte Branch of the of the Federal Reserve opened on the nineteenth floor.  

While the work of Louis Asbury may have been done, Henry McAden and the First National Bank had to make their investment in the new building payoff.  In 1925 Lockwood and Greene estimated the cost of the building at around 1.5 million, and a later estimate put the cost at 1.9 million.  But it appears that filling the new building with tenants was difficult.  In late 1930 the Charlotte News reported that the building only had a 30% occupancy rate.[13]  Powell Majors, a long-time financial executive in Charlotte, remembers Henry McAden:

Henry wore high celluloid collars and seemed distant to me….Rumor had it that Henry would not allow doctors to be tenants because of the various odors that would be created by their offices. [14]

Powell also recalls that McAden:

Failed to rent to the telephone company because he feared that linemen would be in and out of the building. The Johnston building, later the Linked Carolina Bank building, added floors to accommodate Southern Bell.[15]

This reluctance to rent to undesirable tenants contrasted with the situation at the Johnston Building where the rental agent  Thomas Griffith claimed in 1924 that the building was  "already largely booked as to tenants and will likely have a compliment of occupants when it is ready to open."[16]

Two years after the bank's opening, the Reynolds Building in Winston Salem surpassed the First National Bank Building to become the state’s tallest building, and within three years the optimistic climate in Charlotte and the nation had changed drastically.

The Failure of the First National Bank of Charlotte

On December 4, 1930, the First National Bank of Charlotte failed to open its doors.  A notice posted on the cast-bronze doors read:

On account of heavy withdraws of our deposits, we have decided to close our bank, in order that every depositor be protected alike, and the bank is now in (sic) charge of the national bank examiners for the purpose of orderly liquidation.  First National Bank of Charlotte, N.C. By Henry M. McAden, President; R.C. Johnson, Cashier.

A statement issued that same day clarified the situation:

Conditions the most trying ever experienced in this section, has made business with us extremely poor.  Several years ago when  conditions were on the high road to bigger business and larger returns, our institution believing in ever increasing prosperity, planned and carried out a building program for our bank, that had conditions remained good, would have been for us a gratifying success and have largely increased our business

The large expenditure of funds for our building, when business slackened and became less, made this expenditure a great burden on our resources, and this same lack of good business, made the task of putting our proposition on a paying basis from a rental standpoint more difficult, and with our liquid funds largely invested in building, our bank problems daily have become so complex that in justice to everyone it has become our firm conviction, that our institution should be turned over to the national bank examiners for an orderly liquidation.

On top of all this burden within the last ten days the withdraws of funds have been exceedingly heavy and this has made our action imperative at this time…. [17]

While the opening of the First National Bank Building did not merit front page coverage, the demise of the bank commanded extensive front page coverage. In the papers it was universally reported that the failure of the bank was directly due to the expensive new building on Tryon Street.  A headline in the December 5^th Charlotte Observer read: “Heavy Carrying Charges on New Building Blamed For Closing Institution.”  W. H. Wood, president of the American Trust Company, was quoted as saying: “The primary cause of the closing of the First National Bank of Charlotte was the abnormally large investment which that bank made in its 21-story office building, which cost $1,818,000.  That was a mistake in judgment.”  He went on to say: “This closing was not unexpected by the bankers of Charlotte, and, while it is unfortunate, it really is not of great importance because it was the smallest bank among the seven commercial banks of Charlotte and had only about $1,600,000 total of deposits.”[18]

The Charlotte National Bank Experienced a "run-on-the-bank" due to the collapse of the similarly name First National Bank of Charlotte

The Charlotte News and the Charlotte Observer took an activist role in the crisis, downplaying the significance of the bank failure, and promoting the soundness of the other banking institutions with headlines that read “FEEL NO ALARM OVER CRASH OF FIRST NATIONAL, Failure Attributed to Peculiar Circumstances, OTHER BANKS UNAFFECTED.” [19]  A run the same day on the similarly named Charlotte National Bank was downplayed, attributed largely to “negros whose withdraws were observed to be from $10 to $40.”[20]  The editorial page of the Charlotte Observer went so far as to put a positive spin on the bank failure. 

But out of yesterday’s affair the Charlotte intuitions will emerge more firmly implanted in the confidence of the local public than ever, because of the established strength that means the Charlotte banks are as firmly planted as a rock.  One weak point has been worked out of the situation…[21]

The failure of the First National Bank of Charlotte was noted in the national media.  Perhaps more objective than the local media, Time Magazine saw the failure linked to a larger bank crisis involving Caldwell & Co., a financial institution in Tennessee. 

Despite the optimism expressed by other bankers and the local press, the financial situation in Charlotte continued to decline drastically, as it did in the rest of country.  The predictions of stability from Charlotte’s newspaper editors and bank presidents proved hollow as four of the seven Charlotte banks that existed in 1930 failed during the Great Depression. 

Despite the demise of the bank, the building at 112 South Tryon Street continued to be called the First National Bank Building until at least 1939.  By 1934 the grand bank facility in the base of the building contained the Charlotte Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Virginia, which also retained its offices on the 19^th floor.  If the office tower was only 30% leased in 1930, then new ownership of the building had better luck with an occupancy rate of around 60% in 1934.  This, despite the fact that overall economic conditions were generally much more dire in 1934 than in 1930.  Tenants in 1934 included the National Barber Shop and the National Bank Building Soda Shop on the first story.  If Henry McAden had a prohibition on physicians as tenants, then it had been lifted with the new owners.  Numerous physicians, dentist, and hairstylist were found on many of the floors.  The majority of the building, however, was occupied at that time by insurance businesses, cotton industry offices, and government offices.[22] 

By 1942 the building had changed names to the Liberty Life Building.  The Federal Reserve Bank had moved to their new building a few blocks away on South Tryon Street, but much of the rest of the building appears to have been occupied. [23]

The Charlotte Brach of the Federal reserve Bank moved out of the First National Bank Building in 1942, and into this facility on South Tryon Street.  The 1942 Federal Reserve Building has been demolished.

By 1964 the building’s name changed again and became the Baugh Building, and a new “modern” façade was added.  Despite the facelift and the fact that the First National Bank Building was still the tallest building in the city, tremendous post-WWII commercial growth in Charlotte meant that more modern office space was available.  City Directories from 1964 indicated that the building again had many vacancies.  By 1976 businesses were leaving the Uptown, and the building, now called the Bank of North Carolina Building, was half empty with many of the floors completely vacant.    

In 1982 SYNCO Inc. invested $11 million in the building, restoring the original entrances and adding a twenty-story extension to the rear wing.   A. G. Odell & Associates were in charge of the renovation.[24]  The building has been sensitively updated since that time and now appears to be in exceptionally good condition.  The First National Bank Building is now owned by TSO Tryon Plaza LLC.