Meet the Charlotte man with thousands of historic NC maps
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Chuck Ketchie in his home office holding a map of Wilmore. Photo: Ashley Mahoney/Axios
Chuck Ketchie has thousands of maps of North Carolina — specifically Charlotte.
Why it matters: For a city grappling with how to grow and preserve its history, these century-old maps tell important stories about Charlotte's past.
Context: Ketchie, a Charlotte native and East Mecklenburg High School grad, left his hometown in 1975. Like most kids trying to get out of their hometown, he swore he would never move back.
- "I ate those words in 1992," Ketchie tells Axios. Today, he lives in south Charlotte with his wife and two golden retrievers.
Zoom out: Ketchie remembers family vacations as a kid where his father would intentionally include historical spots on their trips. In college, work on a research paper led him to researching Carolina gristmills, where grain was ground up. Mills and maps have become a passion of Ketchie's.
- He's the editor of Old Mill News, a quarterly magazine highlighting the history of gristmills. He also has an Etsy shop specializing in gristmill gifts, from coasters to Christmas ornaments.
Zoom in: Ketchie's journey with maps started when he was introduced to Garland P. Stout, a former engineer who drew thousands of historical research maps of North Carolina. He and Stout began including Ketchie's mill research on Garland's maps.
- Then Ketchie met Rick Brooks in the early 2000s. Brooks is a descendant of the Spratt family, who for decades served as the Mecklenburg County surveyors. Brooks had thousands of Spratt maps, which are now part of Ketchie's collection.
- Ketchie's collection has been used by various universities and institutions, including UNC Charlotte.
- Among the maps in his collection are a 1917 map of Camp Greene (a major military base that spurred Charlotte's growth during World War I), a 1924 map of Charlotte's original speedway (the Pineville speedway's inaugural race set a new world record in 1924), and several gold mine maps from 1905 (Charlotte's gold history runs deep).
- Ketchie is in the process of digitizing these maps to make them accessible to the people of Charlotte.
What's next: Eventually, Ketchie plans to turn some of the maps in his collection into a book.
