Henry C. Owens (November 15, 1797-January 24-1848) was a builder active in the Charlotte area in the 1830s and 1840s. Although he is not well known today, and there are few known records of his life, he was sufficiently well regarded in his day to gain the important contract for (re)building the United States Branch Mint II in Charlotte. Newspaper accounts indicate that he accomplished other notable projects as well.

Little is known thus far of Owens’s background, including the names of his parents and how he learned his trade. In 1820s he was listed in Salisbury newspapers among the people for whom the local post office was holding unclaimed mail. In 1832 he was married in Mecklenburg County to Jane Elizabeth Allison, with whom he had three sons, and in 1833 he was mentioned in the Charlotte Journal as having been elected a town commissioner in that city. The United States Census of 1840 listed him as a resident of Mecklenburg County, NC, heading a household of 8 white people and six enslaved black people. His grave is in the Old Settlers Cemetery in Charlotte.

Relatively little is known of Owens’s career as a builder. He ran an advertisement in the Charlotte Journal of September 13, 1835, and other issues, seeking to employ 3 or 4 good journeymen carpenters, who were required to carry recommendations for “industrious and steady habits.” These advertisements were likely related to work in nearby Davidson. In 1835, H. Owen, probably Henry Owens, joined with others to construct eight brick buildings for Davidson College, a new Presbyterian school for men in the town of Davidson. The minutes of the Concord Presbytery recorded on October 10, 1835, that the building committee for the college had contracted for eight buildings to be built of brick on stone foundations and covered with tin roofs and “finished complete.” The college was to supply the brick. The contract had been awarded to Messrs. S. & J. Lemly (see Samuel Lemly and H. Owen sic for $10,250, to be paid in three installments in March of 1836, 1837, and 1838. H. Owen is believed to have been Henry Owens. These original buildings included three 2-story brick structures (a Chapel, a Steward’s Hall, and President’s House); two smaller buildings; and “3 blocks of Buildings one story high, 18 by 66 feet,” which were dormitories known as Oak Row, Elm Row, and Cedar Row. These dormitories and the president’s house and steward’s hall were completed for the opening session of the college in 1837, and the chapel was finished the following year. Of these, Oak and Elm rows, each with four chambers with individual outside entrances, survive as the oldest intact buildings on the campus.

By the mid-1840s, H. C. Owens was counted among the leading tradesmen in Charlotte and in 1844 was identified as a carpenter (Mecklenburg Jeffersonian Nov. 10, 1844). He also held a few civic offices. According to a visitor’s account of a trip to Charlotte, carried in the Wilmington Journal of May 30, 1845, “The first thing of interest in Charlotte is the rebuilding of the mint under the directions of J. W. Colwell, Esq., who has contracted with Mr. H. C. Owens for the sum of $20,000, who has recently completed the Court House and Jail in that place, giving entire satisfaction to the Committee of Inspectors appointed to examine the same; thus giving evidence of his skill and ability to do ample justice to the Government in re-building the mint.”

The premier project for Owens was the United States Branch Mint II in Charlotte, which he built in 1845 as a 1-story building after its 2-story predecessor by Philadelphia architect William Strickland burned in 1844. The Raleigh Weekly Standard carried an announcement on April 23, 1845, that the superintendent of the mint had made a contract for rebuilding the Branch Mint at Charlotte with Mr. H. C. Owens of Charlotte for the sum of $20,000, less than the $25,000 the federal government had appropriated for the purpose. The Mecklenburg Jeffersonian of May 9, 1845, reported Owens busy at work “removing the rubbish of the old Mint building preparatory to erecting a new one.” The same newspaper reported on September 4, 1846, that the new building, “put up in the most substantial and workmanlike manner,” did great credit to “Capt. Owens the contractor.” (Discovery of gold deposits in the western Piedmont of North Carolina had generated a gold rush, which proved sufficiently productive to warrant establishment of a United States branch mint in Charlotte and boost the town’s prosperity. This phenomenon was soon outshone by the California gold rush of ’49.)

At Henry Owen’s death on January 24, 1848, several regional newspapers carried news of his demise. The Salisbury Carolina Watchman of February 3 recalled him as “formerly a citizen of this county” but did not mention any buildings he had constructed in that community. The Fayetteville Weekly Observer of February 1 noted that Owens, “a very respectable and a useful citizen, had died in Charlotte, and that he was “the Builder of the Branch Mint, and other public buildings in that part of the state.”

Mary D. Beaty, Davidson: A History of the Town from 1835 until 1937 (1979).

Anthony Joseph Stautzenberger, The Establishment of the Charlotte Branch Mint: A Documented History (1976).