Although much of the retail and residential areas in Huntersville are new, the town also has numerous historic sites within a five-mile drive of Beatties Ford Road. Hopewell Presbyterian Church, for instance, dates to the 1740s and features 200-year-old stone walls around its cemetery. The Hugh Torance House and Store, started in the 1770s, is the oldest surviving store site in North Carolina. The two-room log cabin also sat on a cotton plantation and was used as a school for young ladies, slave quarters and an overseer’s house.
Each April, the Loch Norman Highland Games celebrate the area’s Scots-Irish heritage with athletic competitions, bagpipe music, dancing, tartan parades and historical demonstrations.
Another pocket of preserved Huntersville is Latta Plantation Nature Preserve, the county’s largest green space with hiking trails, picnic shelters, a nature center, an equestrian center, boating and fishing on Mountain Island Lake and the Carolina Raptor Center, which rehabilitates and releases injured birds of prey.
Huntersville also has a new family fitness center and outdoor fun park where kids can slide through tubes, spray water cannons and climb sprinkler-filled jungle gyms set inside a pool.
Cornelius also has felt Lake Norman’s growth spurt, climbing from 2,500 residents in 1990 to about 19,000 today. In the past decade, large, upscale developments such as The Peninsula arrived, adding hundreds of homes to the area.
Services and shops followed, and Cornelius embraced the population boom by welcoming commercial development. Upscale shopping centers line West Catawba Avenue off Exit 28. Shoppers flock to Jetton Village, Shops on the Green, SouthLake Shopping Center and strip after strip of boutiques and eateries on West Catawba Avenue. Now the shops have overflowed to East Catawba, where old bungalows and stately brick homes have been converted into funky, fun downtown boutiques.
Lake Norman residents already enjoy two top-notch county parks in Cornelius – the 105-acre Jetton Park with lake access, tennis, bike rentals, walking trails, picnic shelters, playground and a beach; and Ramsey Creek Park, a 43-acre waterfront park with two large picnic shelters, a playground, volleyball courts, picnic facilities, fishing and boat slips.
Of the three North Meck towns, Davidson has been most resistant to Lake Norman growth. While Huntersville and Cornelius experienced massive growth in the 1990s, Davidson grew by just over 3,000 residents. Today the small college town has about 8,100 residents.
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