As early as 1750, riverbank villages of Catawba Indians gave way to hardy Scots-Irish and German settlers. Tom Polk walked the trail, built his house,  and  started the town called Charlotte on a ridgeline where two trails crossed. Immigrants poured into the Carolinas, particularly gold miners in the early 1800's, who crowded muddy streets when Charlotte was the gold mining capital of America. Before California's gold rush, miners sought gold under Charlotte's hills and creek sides, tunneling beneath what is now The Panther's Stadium. Native sons Andrew Jackson
and James K. Polk won a U.S. Branch Mint in 1836 on West Trade Street at Mint Street.
     In the "Old South" (before 1860), cotton farmers shipped their raw cotton North or abroad. 
But about 1880 a remarkable change began. This rural region lured cotton mill workers and manufacturers to an emerging industrial "New South." The zealous push for progress in the "New South" clearly succeeded, when a Federal Reserve Branch opened here in 1927. Even until the 1950's, hundreds of local cotton-growing farms fed this textile region's profusion of mills. Since then, banking flexes the major economic muscle here. 
    Charlotte's heady growth radiates from its character of grit, spunk and energy.