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Charlotte has three founding stories, none of which most visitors know. In 1799, a twelve-year-old farm boy named Conrad Reed found a seventeen-pound gold nugget in a creek about twenty-five miles east of town, used it as a doorstop for three years, and eventually sold it for $3.50 to a jeweler who recognized its worth. The discovery kicked off the first gold rush in American history, forty years before California, and a U.S. Mint operated in Charlotte from 1837 until the Civil War. Then in 1775, the citizens of Mecklenburg County drafted a declaration of independence that predated Philadelphia's by over a year, though its authenticity has been argued over ever since. And before all of that, General Cornwallis occupied Charlotte during the Revolutionary War and described it in a letter as 'a hornet's nest of rebellion.'

Charlotte today is the second-largest banking center in the United States after New York, home to the headquarters of Bank of America and the East Coast operations of Wells Fargo.

This financial identity shaped the Uptown district (Charlotteans call their downtown 'Uptown' rather than 'downtown') into a skyline of corporate glass and the surrounding streets into a mix of finance professionals and professional sports: the Carolina Panthers, Charlotte Hornets, and Charlotte FC all play here, and NASCAR is deeply woven into the regional culture with teams and facilities throughout the surrounding counties.