Thomas Trotter. [1]
Born 1800 Suffolk, Nansemond, Virginia, United States. [2]
Residence 1860 Mecklenburg, North Carolina. [3]
"Business"
In 1852, Charlotte began its ascendancy to being a major brokerage and distribution center by the acquisition of its first rail service which ran to Columbia, SC, thus giving it a link to the seaports. Three years later a connection was made to Norfolk, VA, linking the city to the markets of the Northeast. The boom brought by the great increase in cotton trade as a result of the new railroads was reflected in the town.5 It was just before the time of the first railroad service that the investors who bought the "Davidson Corner" developed it to include five stores of three stories with a common facade, which was either of granite or appeared to be so, because it was thereafter known as "Granite Row" for the next fifty years.
Granite Row, or, as they first called it, Granite Range, was among the first brick commercial buildings in the city, and indeed, may have been the first.7 Construction began in July, 1850,8 and the stores were completed and occupied in September, 1851, when several merchants, including jeweler Thomas Trotter, announced in the papers that they had removed to the "Granite Range."9 Today the basic structure of the Trotter building appears to be the only remaining ante-bellum brick commercial building in the city.
Number Five Granite Row, now 108 South Tryon street, was purchased by jeweler and silversmith Thomas Trotter from the investor group in 1850, and ownership remained in the Trotter family until 1909.10 Thomas Trotter (1800-1865), was a Virginia native who was apprenticed to a silversmith in Salisbury, NC at the age of eighteen, and subsequently opened a shop in Greensboro, NC prior to 1824. In that year, he came to Charlotte and set himself up in the jewelry business singly and at times in partnership with others. Trotter not only would make or gild jewelry, but in an 1833 advertisement said that he continues to manufacture silver spoons and other articles of gold an silver, and he would inform the public, that this is the only shop in town where such articles are repaired. As stated in Silversmiths of North Carolina: "For nearly forty years Trotter dominated the jewelry business of Charlotte."12
Two years after installing his jewelry business in the Granite Row, Trotter took his son William P. in as a partner.13 When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Trotter's four sons (by his first marriage to Margaret Graham in 1828) enlisted in the Confederate army, and he sold much of his extensive real estate holdings in the city to buy Confederate bonds.14 In 1864, Trotter's health began to fail, and he made out a will wherein he left his plantation to his second wife, Jane Elizabeth Brown Trotter (married in 1850), and the children by this marriage, and Number Five Granite Row to the children of his first marriage.15 [4]
71, 10 July 1909.
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