HistoricSiteMarkers
Reconstruction & Gilded AgeProgressive & Modern Era

Queens University of Charlotte

Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina

Marker Inscription

Queens University Of Charlotte. Presbyterian. Organized 1857 as Charlotte Female Institute. Campus moved to this location in 1915. Coeducational since 1987.

Erected by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources

The Story

Founded in 1857 as the Charlotte Female Institute, this Presbyterian school was one of many Southern academies established to educate young women in an era when higher learning was largely closed to them. It relocated to this Myers Park campus in 1915 as Charlotte grew into a regional hub, and opened its doors to men in 1987. The institution's long arc traces the changing place of women and church-founded colleges in American education.

Why it matters

It reflects the 19th-century movement to bring formal education to women in the South and the enduring role of religious denominations in building American higher education.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

Mont Amoena Seminary

Mount Pleasant, NC

Founded on the eve of the Civil War, Mont Amoena Seminary gave young women in the Carolina Piedmont a formal education at a time when few schools would. Run by the Lutheran church, it took a Latinized version of its hometown's name โ€” "Pleasant Mountain" โ€” and educated girls for nearly seventy years, closing in the 1920s. It stood as the counterpart to the men's colleges just up the street in Mount Pleasant.

Mitchell College

Statesville, NC

Founded in 1856 as a college for women and affiliated with the Presbyterian church until 1959, Mitchell College brought higher education to young women of Statesville well before it was common. It later evolved with the times, gaining state community college status in 1973. For more than a century it has served the education of the region.

Dexter Edgar Converse Monument

Spartanburg, SC

This monument honors Dexter Edgar Converse, a Vermont-born industrialist who came south and helped make Spartanburg a powerhouse of the New South cotton-mill economy. In 1889 he lent his name and fortune to found the college memorialized here as a place for the higher education of women, at a time when such opportunities were still scarce. The Vermont-to-Carolina arc on the stone captures a familiar Gilded Age story: northern capital and know-how reshaping the postwar Southern landscape, one textile mill and civic institution at a time.