Why Is Charlotte, North Carolina, Called the Queen City?
Charlotte, North Carolina, is called the Queen City because it was named for Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III of Great Britain. The city’s name was the residents’ second attempt to find favor with the king by honoring Charlotte with a place-name.
George became king in 1760, and in 1761 he turned to his secretary of state, John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute, to help him find a wife. As John Steven Watson writes in Encyclopædia Britannica’s biography of George III:
As king, in 1761, he asked Bute for a review of all eligible German Protestant princesses “to save a great deal of trouble,” as “marriage must sooner or later come to pass.” He chose Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and married her on September 8, 1761. Though the marriage was entered into in the spirit of public duty, it lasted for more than 50 years, due to the king’s need for security and his wife’s strength of character.
The county where Charlotte is located was established through legislation, approved in 1762, that named it Mecklenburg, the historical region where Charlotte Sophia was born in 1744. (Strictly speaking, Mecklenburg consisted of two duchies, Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz. She was from the latter.)
The settlement that would become Charlotte was first established by colonists in 1750 and incorporated in 1768. Residents again sought to please George III, this time naming their city for his wife.
Within a few years, though, the area had turned against the British monarchy and toward American independence: the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, which decried British tyranny, was signed at Charlotte in May 1775, and British troops who occupied the city in 1780, during the American Revolution, faced enough hostility that, according to tradition, they deemed it “the hornet’s nest of rebellion.”
But Charlotte retained its name, and Queen Charlotte remains a presence in the city today, from the crown and Regina Civitatem in the city’s seal to two statues of her, one at its airport and the other in Charlotte’s central business district.
