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On leaving the Sheppard House and continuing on Ninth Street you no
doubt noticed that you were moving into a part of Fourth Ward where
almost none of the old houses remain. In the 1950's and 1960's, the
City of Charlotte began rigorously enforcing its building code. Mildred
McEwen wrote movingly about her feelings when she was forced to tear her
old Fourth Ward homeplace down. "I stood on the street on the verge of
tears. One of the workmen must have felt sorry for me because he
stopped his work and came to the sidewalk and handed me a piece of
'gingerbread.' "
Happily, the Liddell-McNinch House "Liddell-McNinch House" , another example of the Queen Anne style, was not demolished. This imposing Victorian dwelling was constructed in 1892 by Vinton Liddell, whose father, W. J. F. Liddell, had moved to Charlotte in 1875. Vinton's father, still another Yankee, was a brilliant machinist from Erie, Pennsylvania who recognized that Charlotte was fast becoming a major manufacturing center in the late nineteenth century. Therefore he decided to build a plant that made steam engines, saw mills, and cotton presses, as well as other equipment for the textile industry. The Liddell Foundry and Machine Shop were located at North Church Street and the Seaboard Air Line Railroad tracks or about three blocks north from where you are now standing. Liddell Street still marks the site.
Vinton Liddell, like his parents a Baptist, was a vice president of the Charlotte Cotton Mills and also worked for his father, who died in November, 1888. Many years after Vinton Liddell had sold his house on North Church Street in 1903, his daughter, Vinton Liddell Pickens, visited the old homeplace with a reporter from the Charlotte Observer. She remembered a stable with horses in the backyard. She remembered the lot being much bigger. "I do remember hearing that when this house was built, my father insisted on having gas lines installed. It was wired for electricity, but it was quite new, and my father didn't trust it. He wanted the gas in case electricity didn't prove satisfactory."
S. S. McNinch, the Mayor of Charlotte, purchased the Liddell-McNinch House in 1907, and President William Howard Taft visited in the house when he came to Charlotte on May 20, 1909, for the annual celebration of the signing of the alleged Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. The house today serves as the McNinch House Restaurant which serves elegant meals by reservation only. For information, call 332-6159.
Continue south on Church Street until you reach Eighth Street. Turn left on Eighth Street and walk until you reach Tryon Street and go in front of the church to your immediate left.
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