The New South's fastest-growing city — where Bank of America and Wells Fargo's eastern headquarters make it the second-largest financial centre in the US after New York, the NASCAR Hall of Fame honours a sport invented on these country roads, and a Charlotte food scene shaped by Vietnamese, Mexican, and West African immigrant communities has quietly become one of America's most interesting
Charlotte (900,000; metro 2.7 million) is the largest city in North Carolina and the seat of Mecklenburg County — the fastest-growing major US city by population in the first decades of the 21st century, driven by its position as the country's second-largest banking centre after New York (Bank of America and the eastern headquarters of Wells Fargo are both based here). Uptown (Charlotte's term for its central business district, on a hill above the original colonial settlement of Charlotte Town) contains a compact, walkable 1-mile square with excellent mid-century modernist architecture, two m…
Charlotte was established as a small trading post and county seat in 1768, named for Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, consort of King George III — Mecklenburg County was also named for her German homeland, and the North Carolina county seat became the most German-named city in the American South. The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence (20 May 1775) — a purported local declaration of independence from Britain a full 14 months before the national declaration — was claimed by Mecklenburg County residents after the American Revolution but disputed by Thomas Jefferson himself, and its…