|
The Town of Statesville was created by legislative enactment in a bill which passed its final reading in the North Carolina General Assembly, December 19, 1789, just about a month after the constitutional convention voted to take North Carolina into the newly formed United States. It was created as a county seat for Iredell County, formed from western Rowan County the year before. The site, selected by a committee named for the purpose in the bill creating the county in 1788, was approximately at the center of Iredell, on land adjoining the Fourth Creek Presbyterian Church. In the bill which created the town, the site selection committee was named as a governing body of commissioners "for building and carrying on the said town" on fifty (50) acres of land bought from Fergus Sloan. The name of Statesville was included in the original bill, but why that name was chosen can only be guessed. Nearly a century later, as the centennial celebration was approaching, three (3) guesses were made, but none of them was confirmed. One (1) guess was that it lay near the center of the State before the western portion was ceded to the Federal Government to form Tennessee. Another was that it lay near a State road that passed somewhere nearby. A third guess was that, since the name was actually picked during the year 1789, when North Carolina had refused to join the United States and was, along with Rhode Island, a free and independent State, the name of Statesville has something of a states' rights meaning. A hastily built log courthouse, erected on a knoll above Fourth Creek Church, was opened in time for the June Session of the County Court in 1790, and in August lots were sold on Broad and Center Streets, with the courthouse at their intersection, and on Meeting, Front and Tradd Streets. The village around the courthouse grew slowly, with a population of only two hundred fifteen (215) in 1850, some fifty (50) years after its founding. There was progress of a kind, however. Roads were shifted to pass the county seat, and it became a stopping place for stagecoaches, with a few taverns to take care of the travelers. In 1801 the first post office was established. In 1816 a school for boys was established and flourished for a while, and in the late 1820's a school for girls was begun. In 1820 a new brick courthouse on the square took the place of the old log one. The Legislature of 1800 passed a law for continuing a town government by the election of three (3) commissioners every three (3) years, commissioners who had the power to make rules and regulations and levy taxes. Occasional references are found to such commissioners during the next half century, but their records have been lost. In 1847 the form of government was changed, and the town was incorporated. Provision was made for a town magistrate and four (4) commissioners to be elected every two (2) years. Arthur M. Walker was appointed town magistrate, and with him a council of commissioners heavily laden with innkeepers. When records began to make their actions clear in 1855, the makeup of the council had changed but little from those appointed in the original incorporation. The first ten (10) years of the new form of government were years of crisis for the village. An almost successful attempt was made in 1852 to divide the county in the center, with two (2) new county seats, thus dealing a death blow to Statesville by making it unnecessary. Late in 1854 the two (2) blocks to the west of the square and the courthouse were burned to the ground. The county records were saved, but those of the town were likely burned, since extant proceedings of the commissioners began with the following May. A violent windstorm then damaged the college which was built at the end of West Broad Street as a school for girls. Finally the village aroused itself from such disasters, staved off the county division, completed the college building and built a new courthouse at the present site and other brick buildings to take the place of those burned. More important, the leaders saw to it that the Western North Carolina Railroad from Salisbury came by the town, reaching Statesville October 1, 1858. Another railroad, began as the Atlantic, Tennessee and Ohio from Charlotte in 1859, was completed early during the Civil War and then rebuilt during Reconstruction days. As the railroads reached the town, the complexion of the government began to change. Chief magistrates Otho Gillispie and Robert Simonton, who followed Walker, were still tavern keepers, but their main interest was in railroads. A change in the charter was necessary to allow Statesville to vote bonds for finishing the railroad from Charlotte. The change was made in 1861, and the bonds were voted, giving the town its first bonded debt, a debt that was to plague it until the turn of the century. The junction of the two (2) railroads changed the courthouse village into a trading center for several counties. It became a port of entry for that section of North Carolina all the way to the Tennessee and Virginia border and established an economic and political overlordship in that territory. Its lawyers became the representatives to Congress, and its merchants exchanged goods shipped in for all kind of produce, especially for cotton, tobacco, herbs and liquor. In the 1880's tobacco manufacturing was tried, and the growing town boasted it was the wholesale liquor capital of the world. After the Civil War, Col. S. A. Sharpe was elected town magistrate, but soon his title was changed to mayor, with no other evident change in the form of city government until 1885. Then the town was divided in four (4) wards by the intersection of Broad and Center Streets, and two (2) aldermen were elected from each ward, with a mayor elected independently by the whole town. Usually the aldermen were from the merchant group and represented their viewpoint. In the late 1880's, as the railroads began to move closer to the mountains, to Taylorsville and North Wilkesboro, the Statesville merchants began to make a conscious attempt to make up for the loss of their trading territory by turning to industry. In the early 1890's they built a cotton mill and, after 1900, two (2) more. By 1900 they were preaching diversification of industry and had established roller mills and furniture factories, while some heavy metal industry was growing up. The growing city, with a population of more than two thousand (2,000) in 1890 and three thousand (3,000) in 1900, voted bonds to build an electric power station just before 1890 and then voted taxes for a graded school just after 1890. Before 1900 a third bond issue had been voted to build a water and sewer system. In 1907, soon after the first hydroelectric power dams were built along the Catawba River, the city council signed a contract with the Southern Power Company for electric power, thus giving industry another boost and providing a source of income for the government. In the meantime the wholesale liquor industry was destroyed by a vote for local option prohibition in 1903, and Winston-Salem and Durham were forging ahead in the tobacco industry so much that Statesville was forced to drop out of competition. As the herb business gradually died out, the trading Statesville of the last half of the nineteenth century disappeared and a city of diversified industry took its place. Even before the Civil War the corporation limits had been enlarged, and since then they have been extended time after time. The original fifty (50) acres has been extended to cover 5,910.27 acres, as of July 1, 1959. Since 1900, each census has shown a growth in population with the city passing the ten thousand (10,000) mark by 1930 and reaching nearly seventeen thousand (17,000) by the census of 1950. In the late 1920's there began a change in civic policy in connection with industry. The early industries were the work of local men, often the merchants, and they furnished the capital. Some foreign capital was brought in, but it was at a minimum. The 1920's, though, began to see a conscious effort to attract outside capital and to get outside industry to move to Statesville. Most important before World War II was the establishment of the Carnation Company in 1938, important because it did so much to change the economy of Iredell County from row crops to dairying. Since World War II the policy of attracting outside industry has become more intense, and the tendency toward diversification of industry, so evident about 1900, has become the keynote of the new policy. In organization the city government did not make much change from 1885 until after the Legislature of 1947, but its compositions reflected the change from trading to industry and then to the bringing in of outside industry. Voting for aldermen was changed from a ward basis to a citywide basis, and staggered terms for the eight (8) aldermen, with half of them elected every two (2) years, was tried. In 1947 a civil service commission was set up, a recreation commission created and a zoning ordinance adopted. At the same time, provision was made for an election in 1948 for the approval of a city manager form of government and the reduction of the number of aldermen from two (2) in a ward to one (1) in each ward. Both amendments carried, and in 1949, C. L. Lineback was appointed first city manager. In 1949, too, a city court, with I. T. Avery as judge, was set up to take the magisterial duties off the mayor. In 1953 the board of aldermen was again increased by increasing the number of wards from four (4) to six (6) with the election of one (1) alderman from each ward. On May 29, 1959, the General Assembly ratified a bill amending the city charter in various respects. The board of aldermen was amended to read city council and the number of wards remained the same, with the election of one (1) councilman from each ward by the qualified voters of the entire city. The mayor continues to be elected at large and by the qualified voters of the entire city. The city acknowledges with grateful appreciation the preparation of this historical information by Mr. Homer Keever. |