Richard Barry House

1.  Name of Property if any:  Richard Barry House (only chimney remains)

2.  Street Address, including City and Zip Code:

Beatties Ford Road

Huntersville, NC 28078

(ADJACENT PARCEL TO THE IMMEDIATE NORTH OF HOPEWELL HIGH SCHOOL, which is located at 11530 Beatties Ford Road in Huntersville, NC 28078, with the tax parcel number 01516133)

3.  Date added to Study list:  3/11/2002

4.  Tax Parcel Number of Property:  023-03-108

5.  Owner of Property:  Mecklenburg County, Real Estate & Finance Department

6.  Current Owner's Contact Information:
Mecklenburg County

600 E. 4th Street

11th Floor

Charlotte, NC 28202-2816

7.  Period or Date of Construction: 

8.  Source of Information for #7:

9.  Present use of Property:  I

a. Agricultural, b. Commercial, c. Educational, d. Entertainment, e. Government, f. Industrial, g. Military, h. Museum, i. Park, j. Private Residence, k. Religious, I. Other

10.  Architectural Style: 

11.  Architectural Significance:  c

a. Outstanding, b. Excellent, c. Notable, d. Commonplace

12.  Map Showing Location of Property:

13.  Paragraph Briefly Summarizing Known History Of The Property:

We have records of settlement in the area as early as the 1740s, a decade before Charlotte's first settlers stopped their wagons near what is now the center of the city. In 1744 Mecklenburg's first itinerant Presbyterian minister, John Thomson, was invited by the residents in the Hopewell area to preach at the home of Richard Barry.

The early history of the northern part of the county is characterized by flourishing plantations and a tight-knit plantation community; as we shall see, family histories in the area are intricately intertwined. Davidson College added a new dimension to the area in 1837, providing the county with its only institution of higher education until Biddle Institute (now Johnson C. Smith University) was founded thirty years later. In the post-Civil War period, as the old plantations declined, the new railroad built through northern Mecklenburg caused Cornelius and Huntersville to grow as textile villages. For the same reason, Davidson also increased substantially during this period.

More recently, new communities have been drawn by the area's lake-side attractions. The rich bottom lands of the Catawba, once plum sites for pioneer farmers, now lie under the waters of Duke Power's Lake Norman, completed in 1963.