Historic Property

The McAden stands out as being different from many of the other large houses in Myers Park. Located at 920 Granville Road, it was built by textile man and banker Henry M. McAden in 1917-1918, and was designed by Charlotte architect Louis Asbury. The modified Roman and English country house with Roman Doriccolumns still retains a great deal of its original style, character, and detail.

Sometimes we forget or don’t even know the people who create the beautiful spaces that enrich and enliven our city. Many of us drive along Queens Road West in Myers Park, for example, and assume that the majesty of the that tree-lined boulevard just happened. Others marvel at the splendor of Colville Road (pronounced “Callville”) in Eastover and believe that it just happened.. The grandeur of such places was meticulously planned by a single human being. His name was Earle Sumner Draper.

John McKee Jamison bought two lots in Myers Park on September 1, 1911, for what was then the large sum of $8,352. Jamison owned and operated the Stonewall Hotel. The Stonewall stood right next to the Southern Railroad Passenger Depot on West Trade St. He also owned a hotel in Henderson, N.C. and was a director of the Charlotte Commercial National Bank. A native of Mecklenburg County, Jamison had returned to Charlotte in 1908 and was obviously a man on the way up. That’s why he was one of the first homeowners to move his family from Uptown to Myers Park, Charlotte’s fanciest streetcar suburb.

John Bass Brown was one of four children born to Peter Marshall Brown and Jennie Beecher Bass Brown. Peter was a native of Charlotte. He was a well-known political figure in the city and was elected mayor in 1901 and 1903. He was the president and a director of Commercial National Bank; president of Highland Park Land Company, Southern Real Estate Loan and Trust Company and Southern Loan and Savings Bank; and a prominent stockholder in the Selwyn Hotel. At the time of his death in 1913 he was one of the city’s wealthiest men and “perhaps the most extensive owner of city property.

In Myers Park’s initial decade, the most desirable building sites clustered close to the greensward of J.S. Myers Park. The park was the former front yard of the farmhouse of John Springs Myers. Myers had planted trees, shrubs and flowers around the homeplace for years before finally deeding his huge cotton farm to son-in-law, George Stephens. Under the old trees, facing the new streets of Hermitage Road, Ardsley Road, Harvard Place, and Granville Road, now rose the homes of such men as Southern Power executives E.C. Marshall, Norman Cocke, Z.Y. Taylor, and J.B. Duke.

On February 28, 1912, the Charlotte Observer annouced that Floyd M. Simmons of the Simmons Company, a local real estate firm, had purchased a tract of land which was contiguous with Myers Park, the elegant streetcar suburb which the Stephens Company had recently begun. John Nolen (1869-1937), the landscape architect for Myers Park, also designed the Simmons developement, which was named “Hermitage Court.”