1927 Oaklawn Avenue

This residence first appeared in the city directory in 1932. Owners for over fifty years were Rev. Abraham H. Prince and wife Susan Prince. Rev. Prince ranked among the leading ministers in the southeastern United States, director of evangelical outreach for the Atlantic Synod and later the Catawba Synod of the Presbyterian Church.

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Abraham H. Prince came from South Carolina to attend what is now Johnson C. Smith University in the late 1910s. It was then called Biddle University and it still had a “high school department,” a necessity in an era when many rural counties across the South provided little or no public education for black children beyond eighth grade. In 1920 the Charlotte Observer noted that the graduation exercises for the Biddle highschoolers included a prize for oratory. Professors chose the six best students in the class to compete: A.H. Prince spoke on “Our Place in the World’s Reconstruction.”

That gift for public speaking helped set the young man on his life’s path. He stayed on for college at Biddle, well regarded as a training ground for Presbyterian pastors. In 1923 he won the school’s medal for oratory and upon graduation he took up the robes of the ministry. By the mid 1930s he was leading Brooklyn Presbyterian Church, an important congregation in Charlotte’s main black neighborhood. (The church would later merge with today’s First United Presbyterian on Seventh Street when the Brooklyn neighborhood was wiped out by “urban renewal” in the late 1960s).

He married Susan Peacock Prince in 1930 and the pair likely built this house soon after. She came from Wilson, North Carolina, where her father had been a political leader during the years before Disfranchisement, appointed Assistant Postmaster in 1891. Susan attended Shaw University in Raleigh and became a lifelong educator in Charlotte’s public schools. In 1940 the U.S. Census indicated that the couple had two daughters: Dorothy, age eight, and Susan, age six.

Rev. Prince traveled often to speak at the invitation of Presbyterian churches around the Carolinas. In 1939 he left Brooklyn Presbyterian to take up that work full-time. He became “Field Representative for the Synod of the Atlantic, comprising the states of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida,” reported the Carolina Times of Durham. Later he shifted to a similar position in the Catawba Synod, serving western North Carolina. For two decades he worked with local pastors to expand their churches’ influence in their communities and he spoke frequently about evangelistic techniques to ministerial conferences.

In 1978, near the end of his life, the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper carried the news that “The McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago recently awarded a certificate of recognition to Rev. Abraham H. Prince in recognition of ’50 years of distinguished service’ to the United Presbyterian Church.”

Rev. Prince lived in this house at 1927 Oaklawn Avenue during the 1930s and into the 1940s. His work for the Presbyterian synods evidently spurred him to find a home more central to his travels. By 1951 he was no longer listed at this address, nor even in Charlotte. But he continued to own the house as rental property at least into the 1970s. A note in the 1967 JCSU yearbook indicated he was then living in Columbia, South Carolina, pastor of Ebenezer Presbyterian Church. Rev. Prince died in Columbia on April 10, 1985 at age 85.

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In 2018, Angela Mcmillian-Orr shared this memory: “My grandmother Mabelle Roberts lived in this house for many years. My aunt Pansy Roberts purchased it in July 1989 for my grandmother to continue to live in this house.  There were 3 generations of family that grew up in this home from the Roberts [era].  It still remains in our family today. I had the opportunity to meet Rev. Prince when I was a small child. It makes me proud to know that this home has so much rich history. ”