Local landmark or National Register? What the labels actually mean

Local landmark or National Register?

The National Register of Historic Places

A federal listing, maintained by the National Park Service. Mecklenburg County has 110 listings — individual buildings and thirteen historic districts. Each carries a reference number, a listing date, and a record that names the architectural style, the architect where known, the areas of significance, and the periods of significance.

That record is more useful than it sounds. It is where you learn that the Olmsted Brothers are recorded among the designers of Dilworth, that John Nolen is named for both Elizabeth and Myers Park, that Stuart Warren Cramer built the North Charlotte mill village now known as NoDa, and that Earle Sumner Draper laid out the Pineville Mill Village.

The register is administered nationally. You can read the official record for any listed property through the Park Service's NPGallery.

Locally designated historic landmarks

A local designation, made by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission. There are 294 designated landmarks across the county as we count them — 187 in Charlotte and the rest in Huntersville, Davidson, Matthews, Cornelius, Pineville and Mint Hill. Each has a designation report and an ordinance behind it.

The local list reaches places the federal one does not. McDonald's Cafeteria at 2023 Beatties Ford Road, built around 1970, is a locally designated landmark: a Mid-Century Modern plaza founded by John William McDonald, a Charlotte-born Black entrepreneur, that housed a cafeteria alongside a seafood store, a beauty and barber shop, an insurance and real-estate office and a grocery. The Commission describes it as an entrepreneurial incubator and a social and political hub for the West End's Black community, and records that McDonald deliberately let units at affordable rates to young Black entrepreneurs.

The two overlap, and neither contains the other

Plenty of Charlotte properties hold both designations. Plenty hold only one. If you are researching a building, check both registers rather than assuming one covers the other.

Where to look a property up

• National Register: the National Park Service's NPGallery, searchable by reference number.
• Local landmarks: the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission's designated properties pages, organised by municipality and area.