Faculty Homes before McConnell

Many Davidson residents know that the McConnell neighborhood was initiated to provide housing for Davidson faculty and staff. Although never designed to be exclusively college families, the intention, following a long-standing tradition at the college, was to create new homes at prices that would allow college employees to live in Davidson.

College assistance with housing has been around from the beginning. Since the college preceded the town, the college had to build homes for its new faculty, or in the case of Davidson’s third professor, Samuel Williamson, rent a home until funds could be found to build one. In the first decades, homes cropped up on Main Street and Concord Road.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the college became more active. A March 1958 college newsletter announced,

Less than three years after the adoption of a new housing policy at Davidson College twenty-five members of the faculty and staff have changed their status from renters to homeowners and the serious “faculty housing problem” at Davidson has been eliminated.

The article goes on to describe circumstances that sound remarkably contemporary:

There were not enough houses and many were old and antiquated. . . . In addition, there were no good houses or lots for sale at reasonable prices in the town of Davidson and suitable low-cost financing was unavailable. . . this problem was growing more serious because of the increase in the size of Davidson faculty and by the increasing number of non-college people choosing Davidson as a good place to live, to work in Davidson or in nearby Charlotte, or to retire.

One part of the solution was to create a subdivision using college land near to campus along Lorimer, Hillside and College streets. The college’s efforts earned an article “These are the Houses the Faculty Built,” in the January 1960 College and University Business. (Attempts to get an article a similar piece in House and Garden were not as successful).By the time of the article 20 lots had been sold and 16 houses built in the new neighborhood and seven new houses were built elsewhere in town.

By 1963, fifty homes had been built or purchased by college families.  With the continuing growth of the college and town, the trustees approved purchasing a 25 acre tract off Concord Road with a planned 37 homes for a new faculty subdivision.  The president’s report to the Trustees that year had 4 pages of photographs of homes built since 1955.

These homes have become part of the fabric of the town. They have also played a role in the town’s Civil Defense plans in the 1960s.  Check in next week for more about those plans.