Homecoming celebration in McCrorey Heights

KEN KOONTZ

Winston Robinson with his wife Qiana and their sons mingled with former and current residents of the McCrorey Heights community in west Charlotte.

Former and current McCrorey Heights residents recently got together to celebrate the historic neighborhood.

Marilyn Twitty Brown recalled being the only girl for a long time among a neighborhood full of boys for playmates.

“We had a Tarzan rope and would swing across the creek,” she recounted. “And my mother would be furious with me at the end of the playing day because I would come home covered with red dirt.”

Her father, Walter Twitty, was the top local executive of a Black-owned life insurance company. She and her husband Mel returned to Charlotte almost 20 years ago to live in the home her father built on Madison Avenue in the 1950s.

McCrorey Heights was the brainchild of Johnson C. Smith University President Henry L. McCrorey as the city’s first exclusively designed and developed community for the Black middle class. McCrorey bought and carved out land about a quarter mile from JCSU with a blueprint for development that featured approximately 200 high-end income homes.

Most residents were educators, ministers, service and medical professionals, civil rights activists, political and community leaders and entrepreneurs. Most of the architectural plans were exclusive as hardly any homes had similar designs.

Many of the original homes were ultimately razed when local government imposed eminent domain, giving way to the Vest Water Treatment Plant that was completed in 1924 as a then-state-of-the art facility on the community’s western edge along Beatties Ford Road.

Land and homes were subsequently taken in the 1960s for major road and highway construction that included Interstate 77 to the east and Brookshire Freeway to the South.

Most of those early homeowners have died. But residents who grew up in McCrorey Heights as children are now themselves seniors, with the youngest in their mid-60s to early 70s. Some have even moved back to their old neighborhood and into original family homes. Some homes have been renovated while others have fallen to gentrification by white families that have discovered the area and remade homes once occupied by Black middle-class families.

Descendants of those original families in conjunction with the McCrorey Neighborhood Association threw an outdoor homecoming party to welcome those earlier neighbors back for reunion and memories.

There were original children playmates and neighbors, grandchildren, great-grands and even great-great grands of those original families and at least one family that reflects new faces of the gentrified community.

Gwen Carter-Adamson and her 94-year-old mother, Esther Carter Buie came farthest for the homecoming, driving down from their home in Greensboro. Esther and her first husband built their McCrorey Heights home on Fairfield Street in a section known as Platinum Hill.  The seven homes built on their street were taken out to make way for Brookshire Freeway.

Audwin Ross, the unofficial neighborhood historian, related that he was born at Good Samaritan Hospital Blacks and grew up in the family’s McCrorey Heights home he still lives in.

Some homes were built as early as 1913 on Washington Avenue, the oldest street in McCrorey Heights. The “Shady” Payne home on Washington Avenue is credited with having the most extravagant masonry in the neighborhood. Payne, a bricklayer, was said to have done much of the brick work at Park Road Shopping Center in south Charlotte and the now-demolished Charlottetown Mall southeast of the urban core.

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