Including more than 1,000 artifacts, images, video clips, music, and oral histories, Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers: Reinventing Charlotte and the Carolina Piedmont in the New South uses Charlotte and its 13 surrounding counties as a case study to illustrate the profound changes in the South since the Civil War.
Visitors tour many different “environments” within the exhibit for learning experiences about:
- Life in a one-room tenant farmer’s house
- Seed cotton
- Machines on the floor of the cotton mill
- Life in a mill house
- Good Samaritans Hospital Chapel, one of the first African American hospitals in the South
- Main street with stores
- Personal accounts from local sit-in leaders at a lunch counter
