Hezekiah Alexander House: The 1774 Stone Dwelling That Survived Charlotte

In 1774, a traveler approaching Charlotte, North Carolina, a small county seat, could have seen a two-story house built of stone.

That house, built for Hezekiah Alexander, a planter who had trained as a blacksmith, still stands on its original site. It is one of the few eighteenth-century stone houses left in North Carolina, and it offers a rare look at how a colonial family lived, worked, and kept its property.

A planter and blacksmith on the frontier

Hezekiah Alexander was a farmer and planter in Mecklenburg County, which was formed from Anson County in 1762. Charlotte was incorporated as the county seat in 1768, and it was still a small community when Alexander built his house in 1774. He had come to North Carolina as a blacksmith, and farming became the source of his fortune.

Alexander was born in Cecil County, Maryland, and moved through Pennsylvania and Delaware before settling in North Carolina, where he bought land on Sugar Creek in 1767. He is described as Scotch-Irish. He built his standing through land, farming, and local office rather than inherited wealth, and the stone house became the center of his expanding farm.

How the house was built

The walls are built of native Piedmont stone set in oyster shell mortar, and the house has two full stories over a high basement. Building in stone required gathering and hauling rock, and the construction was most likely completed through enslaved labor.

The house's form resembles stone houses built by German settlers in Pennsylvania and by Dutch settlers in the Hudson Valley. Its walls are about two feet thick, and stone arches reinforce the structure above the doors and windows. Visitors can see the house and its reconstructed log kitchen and springhouse on the homesite.

Daily life in a colonial household

A household like Alexander's depended on many hands, and its labor included enslaved people. Alexander held thirteen enslaved people in 1790, and the site's interpretation addresses the lives of the enslaved workers who lived and worked there, rather than treating the house as only the story of one family.

Its survival preserves a rare physical record of a planter's household on the North Carolina frontier in the 1770s.

Why it survived the town's growth

Charlotte grew through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and nearly every other eighteenth-century dwelling in the town rotted away or was replaced. The stone house endured on its original site. In 1943 the house was donated to a Methodist conference for a planned retirement community, and in 1949 the Daughters of the American Revolution leased the house and began restoring it.

The house has never been moved, and staying on its original site is one reason it survives. The Hezekiah Alexander Foundation, formed in 1969, raised funds for restoration, and the Charlotte Museum of History now stewards the house as a living history museum with a reconstructed log kitchen, barn, and springhouse.

A contested place in the Revolution

Alexander's name is often linked to the Mecklenburg Declaration, dated May 20, 1775, and to the Mecklenburg Resolves of May 31, 1775. The Resolves were a documented set of radical resolutions that stopped short of declaring independence. Most historians regard the May 20 Declaration as spurious, and there is no contemporaneous evidence that anyone signed it. The house itself was built a year before these events, and it is best read as a record of ordinary colonial life rather than as a monument to any single political moment.