Fourth Ward & the Square
A loop through Uptown's four wards, from a 1799 gold nugget to the banking towers it eventually paid for.
6 stops · 1 hr 15 min walk · 2.1 miles
Entirely on Uptown city sidewalks; every block change is an at-grade signalized street crossing and there are no stairs on the route itself. Surface condition of the Fourth Ward residential blocks is not graded in the record — the historic district's older sidewalks were not corroborated this session, so expect variability there.
- 🚶 On foot
- History
- 🪙 50 Mint Coins on completion
300 South Church Street. Face east, toward the skyline, before you start walking.
Romare Bearden Park
Start in Third Ward's front lawn, opened over Labor Day weekend in 2013 and named for the Charlotte-born collage artist Romare Bearden. The park sits across from the old railroad gulch that once split this side of town from the rest of Uptown — the towers behind you are the payoff of the story this loop is about to tell.
South a few blocks on Mint Street.
Truist Field
The Charlotte Knights' ballpark opened in March 2014 as BB&T Ballpark, the third major sports venue built in Uptown after the arena and the NFL stadium. In 2020, after BB&T's merger with SunTrust formed Charlotte-headquartered Truist Financial, the sign over the gate changed to match — a minor league ballpark renamed by a bank merger, which is as Charlotte a sentence as this guide can write.
Continue south on Mint to the stadium gates, then turn back north toward Trade Street — the long leg of this loop.
Bank of America Stadium
Groundbreaking on the Panthers' privately financed stadium happened in 1994; it opened two years later as Ericsson Stadium. Bank of America bought the naming rights in 2004, and in 2022 Charlotte FC's first home match here drew 74,479 people — at the time the largest crowd in MLS history. Third Ward's concrete cathedral has now been paid for by a phone company and a bank; only one name stuck.
237 North Tryon Street — a block off the Square itself.
The Dunhill Hotel
You're close enough now to the corner of Trade and Tryon — "the Square" — to feel why everything in this city radiates from it. Two Native American trading paths crossed here before Charlotte existed; surveyor Thomas Polk built his home on the spot in 1755. A 12-year-old named Conrad Reed found a 17-pound gold nugget in a creek east of here in 1799, and by 1837 that discovery had put a U.S. Branch Mint a few blocks from where you're standing — striking gold coins in a town that, a century and a half later, would run the largest bank in the country instead.
301 North Poplar Street.
Fourth Ward Park
Cross into Fourth Ward and the towers give way to Victorian porches almost at once — restored 1900s houses standing where, in the 1890s, the Greenville neighborhood also stood, one of several majority-Black communities west of Uptown. Much of the area just north of here was leveled by the early 1970s under urban renewal and rebuilt with suburban ranch houses; the park itself is the ward's one piece of common ground between both stories.
301 North Tryon Street.
Discovery Place Science
Finish blocks from the Charlotte Transportation Center, the transit hub that puts every Blue Line rider a short walk from this loop. Discovery Place has been the science museum three generations of Charlotte kids got dragged to, sitting on North Tryon in the shadow of the same banking towers Third Ward's ballpark and stadium eventually got named for — the Square's gravity, still working, four wards later.
Full details, hours & sources for Discovery Place Science →
Quiz yourself: What did 12-year-old Conrad Reed find in a Cabarrus County creek in 1799?
- A Civil War musket
- A 17-pound gold nugget
- A Catawba trading bead
- A railroad spike
Answer: A 17-pound gold nugget
Reed's find, on his family's farm at Little Meadow Creek, is recognized as the first documented gold find in the United States — and the reason Charlotte got a U.S. Branch Mint in 1837.
PLATE XVIII — TOUR STRIPS
Fourth Ward & the Square, stop by stop
- Third Ward
- First Ward
- Fourth Ward
Solid line — walking legs · bead size — landmark, notable, standard · band — the stop's district
Read this figure as text
| Stop | District | Miles from previous | Minutes from previous |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Romare Bearden Park | Third Ward | start | — |
| 2. Truist Field | Third Ward | 0.1 | ≈6 |
| 3. Bank of America Stadium | Third Ward | 0.3 | ≈15 |
| 4. The Dunhill Hotel | First Ward | 0.7 | ≈35 |
| 5. Fourth Ward Park | Fourth Ward | 0.2 | ≈11 |
| 6. Discovery Place Science | First Ward | 0.2 | ≈9 |
The whole route on one line — the beads sit where the ground puts them, not where a layout would like them.