Pottstown is the oldest African American community in Huntersville, established in 1909 by formerly enslaved people and free Black families in the decades after the Civil War. It is named for Ortho Potts, a farmer and sought-after brick mason who settled here from the Asheville area; the families who followed built their own homes, churches, and schools on land they owned themselves.

At its heart stands the Torrence-Lytle School, opened in 1937 and, until it closed in 1966, the only high school for Black children in northern Mecklenburg County. Much of Pottstown's land is still held by descendants of those original families. As Huntersville's growth closes in, residents have organized through the Pottstown Heritage Group and the Huntersville Community Development Association to resist displacement; in 2022 they persuaded Mecklenburg County to buy the bordering 30-acre Valea Village tract for parkland, and a Pottstown Preservation Plan went before the town in 2025.

Demographics: a small, close-knit historically African American neighborhood of roughly 150 homes, many owned by the descendants of the formerly enslaved families who founded it. Four historic Black churches anchor its streets.

West Davidson is the town's historically African American neighborhood, which took shape in the early twentieth century on a small area west of the railroad, near the cotton mills, lumberyard, and the other industries where many residents worked. By the mid-1920s its streets were lined with one-story frame bungalows and shotgun houses, a Black Baptist church, and a community meeting hall.

Its anchor is the old Davidson Colored School, built in 1937 to serve as both classroom and gathering place for the community, today restored as the Ada Jenkins Center, a nonprofit serving families across North Meck. The neighborhood lies within the Davidson Historic District, listed on the National Register in 2009, even as new commercial construction along Griffith Street presses against its edges.

Demographics: a long-standing African American community woven into Davidson's mill-town past, its modest cottages and churches still intact within the town's protected historic core.

Smithville is the freedmen's community of Cornelius and the largest intact historically African American community in Mecklenburg County. Its roots reach to the 1860s, but it took its name and shape in 1908, when landowner Jacob L. Smith began parceling out his land to Black families, selling to those who could pay and giving it freely to those who could not, so families of formerly enslaved sharecroppers could own homes and stay together.

For generations Smithville sustained itself through its churches, its Rosenwald school, and tight-knit civic life; resident Nannie Potts went on to become Cornelius's first Black and first female mayor. Denied town services for decades, Smithville was finally annexed by Cornelius in the 1970s. Today, hemmed in by lakefront wealth, the Smithville Community Coalition is leading a resident-authored revitalization plan to add affordable housing without displacing anyone.

Demographics: a predominantly Black neighborhood east of I-77, long redlined and underserved, with many aging residents who are direct descendants of the families Jacob Smith first sold land to in 1908.

Huntington Green is a residential subdivision in Huntersville, set between Old Huntersville and Cedarfield. Unlike Pottstown, Smithville, and West Davidson, whose roots run back to the generations just after Emancipation, Huntington Green is a product of the modern suburban growth that has reshaped northern Mecklenburg since the 1990s, when Lake Norman and Interstate 77 turned former farmland into family neighborhoods.

Today it's a small, walkable community of well-kept homes organized around a neighborhood pool and playground, the kind of place residents describe as quiet, friendly, and close to schools and shopping. Its story is less about preservation than about the rapid new development that the area's historic neighborhoods are now working to hold at bay.

Demographics: a family-oriented subdivision of roughly 3,200 residents (ACS block-group); one of the many master-planned neighborhoods built during Huntersville's post-1990 boom.

East Catawba joins the project as the fifth United Neighborhood. Its founding story, families, and landmarks have not yet been documented here. This section is a scaffold for the research team to complete with verified history.

Add the neighborhood's origins, the institutions that anchor it (churches, schools, civic groups), and the pressures it faces today, each with a public source.

Demographics: to be confirmed.