Preserving Charlotte's Past: A Hangar, a Market, a Trip to 1937

by Mark I. West

Enlarge

January 31, 2012

The U. S. Airways plane that has come to be known as the Miracle on the Hudson is now on display at the Carolinas Aviation Museum. The story made headlines this past summer, and after I heard the news, I decided it was time to revisit the museum.  

We used to go to the Carolinas Aviation Museum nearly every month when our son was in elementary school because he was so into airplanes at that stage of his life, but we stopped visiting so often as he got older.  It had been about two years since my last visit, and I was in for a big surprise.  

The museum used to be located in the airport’s original hangar from the 1930s, but in 2010 the museum moved to a much larger and more modern building that - until recently - served as the hangar for Wachovia’s fleet of private jets. Although I was impressed with the new facility, I wondered what happened to the original hangar.

Hangar history

I made an appointment to talk about the hangar with John Scott, the Executive Director of the museum, and he told me the story of another miracle - one that has not made headlines but is still amazing in the context of Charlotte’s tendency to raze its historic buildings: While the original hangar is no longer the centerpiece of the museum, it still stands and it still houses aircraft.  

As Scott explained to me, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) began erecting the hangar in 1936 and completed it in 1937 at a cost of $23,194. Built with high-quality steel, the hangar measures 100 feet by 100 feet, making it big enough to house the commercial planes that were then in service.  

“The completion of this hangar marked the beginning of commercial aviation in Charlotte,” Scott said.  With the rapid expansion of the airport after World War II, new hangars were built, but the original hangar continued to play a role in Charlotte aviation history.  Several aviation companies used it to service or store planes, and in 1993 it became the home of the then fledgling Carolinas Aviation Museum.

The fate of the hangar was called into question in 2010 when the airport built a new taxiway that came too close to the hangar to be safe. However, instead of demolishing the hangar, the decision was made to move it about 100 feet away. 

The big move took place in May 2010.  The movers elevated the entire hangar in one piece, put it on wheels, and rolled it to its new location.  The hangar is still leased to the museum, which now uses it to store four of its historic aircraft that are not currently on exhibit.      

I asked Scott why he thought it was worth saving this building, and he responded by sharing with me his experiences living in Singapore, where he once worked as corporate pilot.  He told me that nowadays there is nothing left of old Singapore; it has all been demolished to make way for gleaming skyscrapers and bustling malls.  

“I don’t want Charlotte to be another Singapore,” Scott said.  “Charlotte Douglas is now the seventh busiest airport in the world in terms of take offs and landings, but it all started here,” he said pointing to the hangar.  “By saving this hangar, we can better understand where we started and how far we have come.”

County Market memories

As pleased as I am that Charlotte’s original hangar has been preserved, I regret that it is no longer open to the public.  Luckily, for those of us who want to get a feel for what it was like to live in Charlotte during the 1930s, another Depression-era building is open to the public: the Mecklenburg Country Market has been functioning as a farmer’s market since 1937.  Located at 1515 Harding Place, the Mecklenburg County Market is shadowed by the gleaming towers of the Carolinas Medical Center.  

The market is a one-story, brick building that was originally constructed in the late 1920s. The bricks were handmade, and there is exposed brickwork throughout both the exterior and interior of the building.  If you look closely at the bricks, you can see that each one is a little different from the other, and some are considerably bigger than bricks used today.  

The construction company that built many of the homes in Myers Park first used the market building as a storage facility.  It then was divided in half.  A dance studio occupied one half, and the other half housed a soda and sandwich shop.  

In 1937, a group of farm wives known as the Mecklenburg County Home Demonstration Club pooled their money and purchased the building.  These rural women used the building as a place where they could sell locally grown produce as well as baked goods, canned foods, and other products. They removed the dividing wall that ran down the middle of the building and arranged to have rows of counters built.  Each vendor rented four feet of counter space. They also paid a small commission on their sales. These women came up with a business plan that has remained viable to this day.

Dale and Lucy McLaughlin now administer the Mecklenburg County Market. For Dale, the market is in his blood - his grandmother was affiliated with the market, as was his mother. Now in his 70s, he still remembers standing behind the counter as a four-year-old boy trying to help his mother. 

He knows every inch of the building.  He can point out the spot where there was once a wood stove that heated the building.  He can tell tales of times when the nearby creek flooded the building.  He sees that the building is maintained, but is determined to preserve the original feel of the place. When you enter the building you travel back in time to an era before the rise of supermarkets and giant agribusinesses.  

Neither the hangar nor the Mecklenburg County Market is a grand or glamorous building. Usually, when people talk about the preservation of historic buildings, they are concerned with saving a Victorian home, the main house from an old plantation, or some other beautiful building.  While I am all for saving such buildings, we also must save the buildings that, though not as glamorous, have played important functional roles in our history. Our city is a richer place because the hangar and the market still stand.