The Lady from Lodge

Part of my job as an archives assistant is processing oral history interviews, which involves listening to them, writing a summary, and identifying key words to assign as what we call “subject headings” that let listeners find other interviews relating to similar topics. Recently, I’ve been processing a batch of sixteen interviews with the founder of the university where I work, Bonnie Cone.

I never met Bonnie Cone; she died ten years before I even moved to Charlotte. But I feel like I’ve gotten to know her a little bit from listening to over sixteen hours of her conversations. And her legacy has affected not only the city of Charlotte but hundreds of thousands of lives—including mine.

Born in the small rural town of Lodge, South Carolina in 1907, Bonnie Cone set out to be a teacher and eventually found her way to a teaching job at Central High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. Soon after, however, she was called upon to direct a college center that met in the high school and had been created to meet the educational needs of returning veterans after World War II. Although the Charlotte College Center of the University of North Carolina was only intended to be a temporary institution, Ms. Bonnie quickly developed a vision for a permanent school that would grow into a full-fledged university and serve the largest urban area in the state, an area that up to that point did not have a publicly funded co-ed university within the entire region.

Through her hard work, tenacity, strategic networking with business leaders and politicians, and tireless advocacy, Bonnie Cone saw the night-school college center through threats of closure in 1949 and ushered it into permanent junior college status as Charlotte College, then on to becoming a four-year school in 1963, and finally to becoming the fourth campus of the University of North Carolina, UNC Charlotte, in 1965. What was initially created to provide a college education to Charlotte-area veterans has now grown into a doctoral research university, attracting students from the Charlotte region and around the world.

Fifty years after Ms. Bonnie’s college achieved university status, I stepped on the campus to fulfill my practicum for an archival studies graduate program, and just over a year later I was thrilled to begin working there for my first non-self-employed post-college job. Two years after that, a young man from Palestine would choose UNC Charlotte out of four possible options as the university to which he would journey to earn his master’s degree. So in a very real sense, the fruits of Bonnie Cone (and others’) labor made it possible for me to have my dream job and to meet my future husband.

If Bonnie Cone had given up and let the Charlotte Center die in 1949, if she hadn’t striven to recruit the highest quality professors and jump through all the hoops to gain legal and financial support for the school, if she hadn’t had the vision for a thriving university, I probably would have had to settle for an “okay” job instead of a great one and my fiancé probably wouldn’t have come to Charlotte.

As I’ve been listening to Ms. Bonnie tell the story of how the college survived and grew into a university, I’ve been thinking about how the faithfulness and determination of one person can have exponential—even eternal—effects. Just taking my fiancé’s and my story as one example, the influence of Bonnie Cone’s life has been used by God to provide me a job, to provide my fiancé a furtherance of his education, to bring us to each other, to join two families and two cultures into a beautiful tapestry, and Lord-willing, to lead to the creation of more eternal souls.  

While I think Ms. Bonnie had an idea that many lives would be influenced by the university she envisioned, I doubt she could have known just how many that would be or grasped just how profoundly those lives would be shaped by what she helped to build. This can be an encouragement to us to remember that we don’t know the future whenever we wonder whether our lives are really making a difference. No, we’re not all going to found a giant university, but we all do things each and every day that touch the lives of others, and we never know how God might use our kindness,  perseverance, and faithfulness in things both big and small to accomplish His work for His glory and our and others’ good.

I have a feeling that if Ms. Bonnie were still here, she would tell you that if she could stick to it and accomplish her goals, then you can too. So the next time you feel like giving up on whatever God has lain on your heart to do, remember the story of a feisty little lady from Lodge whose dedication to implementing a vision one step at a time ended up changing the world. 

To see photos of Bonnie Cone, see the Goldmine Repository from Special Collections and University Archives of UNC Charlotte's Atkins Library.