Long before Charlotte's Arboretum Shopping Center became a distribution center for drugs like heroin, it was farmland and a grass covered field. A crossroads of East and South of 16 and 51.
Those of us who grew up here sit call it 51 and this photo circa 1980 gives you a sense of what was once.
But I can still hear it, a lone truck a mile or more away heading toward Pineville on a two lane. Traffic on 51 had a stop sign and traffic heading north and south on Providence Hwy 16 had only a flashing yellow.
The grass in the summer sun was high and full of the sounds or crickets and cicadas after an afternoon thunderstorm. The Carolina asphalt hot on the soles of your feet.
In the other direction a state department of transportation tractor with a bush hog and side mounted sickle bar mower are making a racket as it hits stumps and rocks along the narrow shoulders of the highway. The grass scattered to the winds which send the grass and Broom Straw high into the humid afternoon air.
The sound rises and falls as the tractor moves south towards Grier’s store the only thing at the corner of Providence and what is now Ballantyne Commons Parkway.
16 was once a thin ribbon of road that stretched past endless miles of farmland, Herefords and Angus cattle. South Waxhaw to the north about six miles the Charlotte City Limits.
Swear to Jesus its true.
1 comment:
Pledge fund?
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