Fact Friday 126 – Queens College – Myers Park Series

Happy Friday!

Queens University of Charlotte is the campus at the heart of Myers Park, and the school is older than the neighborhood by more than half a century. It started uptown as a school for young women and went through several names before moving to Myers Park. Read on for how it got there and grew into the university it is today.

Queens College was originally founded in 1857 as the Charlotte Female Institute, which maintained a building at the corner of College and Ninth streets in uptown Charlotte. In 1891 it was renamed the Seminary for Girls, and in 1896 it merged with a college founded by local presbyteries and became the Presbyterian College for Women.

This photo (above) is from 1914, the year the college moved to its current location in the Myers Park neighborhood and was renamed once again, this time as Queen’s College. The name was adopted for several reasons, but one was as a commemoration of the Queen’s Museum, a classical school founded in Charlotte in 1771 in honor of the city’s namesake, Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg. The buildings shown here were among the first five constructed on the campus, and were designed by prolific Charlotte architect Charles Christian (C.C.) Hook. The neighborhood’s planners saw educational facilities as a key part of a well-planned community designed to lure residents away from downtown, and their offer of free land to the Presbyterian College for Women was hard to resist.

This postcard view from 1918 shows a much broader prospect of the early campus layout.

After World War II, Queens began to admit male students on a nonresidential basis, and by the 1980s it had become a residential coeducational institution offering master’s degrees in several subjects. In 2002 it was officially renamed Queens University of Charlotte, and it remains the focal point of the Myers Park community. The campus has obviously grown over the years but the original buildings still remain, as shown in the current view (below).  

Until next week!

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Information taken from:

Charlotte Then and Now, Brandon Lunsford, 2013.  

“We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.” – Frederick Douglass