HistoricSiteMarkers
Reconstruction & Gilded Age

S. B. Alexander

Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina

Marker Inscription

S. B. Alexander. First president of N.C. Farmers' Alliance, 1887. Was N.C. senator & U.S. congressman. Advocate of agricultural education. Home is 1 block S.E.

Erected by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources

The Story

Sydenham B. Alexander became the first president of the North Carolina Farmers' Alliance in 1887, leading the state chapter of a sweeping agrarian movement that gave hard-pressed farmers a political voice. He also served in the state senate and the U.S. Congress and championed agricultural education for rural people. His home stood a block southeast of this marker.

Why it matters

The Farmers' Alliance he led fed directly into the Populist revolt of the 1890s, one of the great grassroots challenges to Gilded Age economic power.

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Related people

  • ยท Sydenham B. Alexander

Related events

  • ยท North Carolina Farmers' Alliance

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

W. R. Odell

Concord, NC

W. R. Odell was a leading textile manufacturer in the Cabarrus County mill country and served in the state senate from 1905 to 1907. He built his career during the Piedmont's great cotton-mill boom, when the region became the heart of Southern textile manufacturing. Known as a friend of education, he lived a block west of this marker.

Leonidas L. Polk

Polkton, NC

Born on this site in 1837, Leonidas L. Polk became one of the South's great champions of the farmer. He founded the influential newspaper The Progressive Farmer in 1886, led the national Farmers' Alliance, and helped establish the schools that grew into NC State University and Meredith College. His advocacy gave voice to rural people during the agrarian upheavals of the Gilded Age.

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.