The Queen's Name and the Hornet's Nest

The town that became Charlotte was incorporated in seventeen sixty-eight and named with a very specific political calculation in mind. The settlers chose the name Charlotte in honor of Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a German-born noblewoman who had married King George the Third of Britain in seventeen sixty-one and become queen consort. They named the surrounding county Mecklenburg after her German birthplace.

The naming was flattery. The settlers wanted the colonial legislature to make their small crossroads the site of Mecklenburg County's courthouse, and naming the place after the king's wife seemed like the kind of gesture that might help. It did. Charlotte got the courthouse.

The irony arrived about a decade later. By seventeen seventy-five, the people who had named their town after the queen were signing declarations of colonial grievance and organizing militias against the crown. Whether or not the full Mecklenburg Declaration actually declared independence, the resolves that definitely did pass in May of seventeen seventy-five were radical enough to make Mecklenburg County one of the most rebellious in the colonial South.

In seventeen eighty, during the Revolutionary War, British General Charles Cornwallis occupied Charlotte briefly with his forces. The resistance he encountered from local militia and guerrilla fighters was so persistent and so effective that he reportedly called the town a hornet's nest of rebellion before retreating north toward what would become his eventual defeat at Yorktown.

The name stuck. Charlotte's professional basketball team, founded in nineteen eighty-eight, is called the Hornets. The town named for a queen by people who were about to become revolutionaries found a mascot in the insult that an enemy threw at it.