1601 Oaklawn Avenue

Built about 1950. The first owner-occupant was Buel Hendrix, manager of Oaklawn Cemetery across the street. The Hendrix family was white, the only whites known to have lived in this black area. An important later resident in the mid 1960s was Isaac T. Graham, principal of rural Torrence-Lytle School 1937 – 1966 — one of the longest-serving principals ever in Charlotte-area schools.

Buel D. Hendrix, Jr. managed Oaklawn Cemetery across the street, a privately developed burial ground begun in 1915. The Hendrix family deeded it to the city in 1956 and it began accepting African American burials in the 1960s.  About 1955, when his family was preparing to sell the cemetery, Buel Hendrix moved away from this house and an African American family moved in here: Roscoe Trimmier and wife Susie E. He was a driver for Kraft Foods, with no occupation listed in the city directory for her.

A subsequent owner, contractor H.E. Kiser, filed a permit in 1962 to add to and enclose the original side porch, giving the house the horizontal lines characteristic of Ranch style houses of the late 1950s and 1960s.

A noteworthy later occupant in the mid 1960s was Isaac T. Graham.  The 1965 city directory listed him as Principal at rural Torrence-Lytle School in Huntersville north of Charlotte, and his wife Lois N. Graham as Office Secretary at Amay James School.  Built in 1937 as a “union school” with grades one through eleven, Torrence-Lytle offered the only high school classes available to African Americans in the northern part of Mecklenburg County. Isaac Graham led it as principal for its entire existence until it closed in 1966, part of a wave of closures of black schools as students moved to larger previously-white facilities nearby. (The school complex still stands in 2016, an official Charlotte Mecklenburg Historic Landmark.) Indeed, Graham was one of the longest-serving principals in the history of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.