Lincolnton Commercial Historic District

Lincolnton's downtown commercial district surrounds the Lincoln County Courthouse, a stone-veneered Classical Revival building completed in 1923 with hexastyle Doric porticoes facing East and West Main Streets. The district covers about twenty-two acres across twelve blocks, and sixty-four of its eighty resources contribute to its character. Most are brick commercial buildings erected between about 1900 and 1930, when the textile boom spurred growth in the county seat. The Commercial Style dominates, with patterned brickwork and shaped parapets, and the Classical Revival appears in the Reinhardt Building and several bank and storefront buildings. The district is significant for its long role as the center of trade and government in Lincoln County, which dates to the town's 1785 founding, and for its unified group of early twentieth-century commercial architecture. Its period of significance runs to 1955, the fifty-year cutoff.