Name-a-Day Calendar, December 23: Charlotte 49ers
Page 47 of 365
Chosen in: 1961; took effect in 1962
Chosen by: Student body vote
It’s one of the most confounding nicknames in sports: why does a school in the North Carolina Piedmont call themselves the 49ers? The Gold Rush was over 2000 miles away, so why is their mascot a miner and their logo a pickaxe?
Well let’s start at the beginning. It’s 1946. The U.S. has recently won World War II and a bunch of soldiers have just come back home looking for an education. The State of North Carolina responded to this wave of veterans by creating a bunch of “college centers” all across the state, one of which operated out of the basement of Central High School in Charlotte. After three years, the wave had receded and the State decided the college centers were no longer needed. But the founder of the Charlotte Center, Bonnie E. Cone, pushed hard for her school to remain open to serve the region as a junior college. She got her wish and the school was renamed Charlotte College.
The school fielded sports teams in its junior college days; they were known as the Owls because most of the school’s classes were offered at night. This persisted until 1961, when the school had grown enough to move out of the basement and onto its own campus in University City, where it still stands today. It also began operating more like a regular college, so its students sought to update their nickname to match.
For this purpose, a student body vote was held in November 1961. The winning name was “49ers”, submitted in honor of Cone’s efforts to keep the school alive in 1949.1 For whatever reason, this switch didn’t take effect until summer 1962; “Owls” continued to be used in an official capacity until the end of the 1961-62 school year.
As for why the mascot is a miner, that does have to do with a gold rush, but not the one you’re thinking of. North Carolina had its own gold rush before most of the country even knew what California was. In 1799, 12-year-old Conrad Reed was playing on his father’s property in rural Cabarrus County when he found a giant gold nugget and brought it back to his father John. Neither of them knew what gold was, so they just thought it was a big yellow rock. They used it as a doorstop for three years until John finally took it to be appraised by a jeweler, who immediately understood what he was looking at. He told John to name his price and John said “$3.50”, which was about a tenth of a percent of its true $3600 value. Once he realized he’d been bamboozled, John took to looking for more gold on his property and he found quite a lot, leading to a minor storm of gold discoveries that lasted several years. It is this Carolina Gold Rush that led to the miner being the 49ers’ mascot (despite the rush mostly taking place in 1802).
Charlotte College would be acquired by the University of North Carolina System in 1965, transforming them into the UNC Charlotte we know today. The school’s branding continues to evolve with the rest of the school.
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Cone was still the president of the college in 1961.