Put ramekins on a baking sheet. Bake for 25-35 minutes, until puffed and golden. Remove from oven, and let stand for 5 minutes. With a flexible spatula, remove strata to
Cornelius Mayor Woody Washam has fond memories of his earliest flat-top haircuts. It was the late 1950s, and his dad would take him down to the old Brick Row building
Cornelius Mayor Woody Washam has fond memories of his earliest flat-top haircuts. It was the late 1950s, and his dad would take him down to the old Brick Row building
Cornelius Mayor Woody Washam has fond memories of his earliest flat-top haircuts. It was the late 1950s, and his dad would take him down to the old Brick Row building on Main Street. The barber was Wilson Potts, a soft-spoken, amiable man with gently sloping eyes, a well-trimmed mustache — and huge hands. The mayor laughs. “To me, as a kid, he was just this massive man,” Washam says, “with hands as big as I’ve ever seen in my life.” By the time Washam was in his teens in the early ’60s, the shop had moved from its original location at Brick Row to a storefront along Catawba Avenue — where it still sits, almost 70 years after its establishment in 1957.
At Potts, the tools of the trade have been wielded by generations of barbers — Chad Hill, Mickey Potts, Marty Henderson, and Mark Muldrow — to Wilson himself some 40 years ago. Photography courtesy of Potts Barber Shop
Wilson Potts. Photography courtesy of Potts Barber Shop
Potts Barber Shop — the oldest and longest-lasting Black-owned business in this small Mecklenburg County town north of Charlotte — is the only place in Cornelius that Washam has ever gone to get a haircut. As a teen, he’d walk to the shop from his home on Church Street. As an adult, he’d amble over from his office at a local bank.
Washam wasn’t the only kid who got his earliest flat-tops from Wilson Potts. For more than four decades, Potts was the most popular barber in town. Several generations of men in the area first climbed into a barber’s chair at the shop, many of them now town leaders and local historians, lawyers, bankers, blue-collar workers. In the old days — before the civil rights movement heated up, before hippies began growing out their hair and avoiding barbershops — local men and their sons would line up for hours outside Potts Barber Shop on weekends to get their weekly cuts and their local news.
Tools of the trade have been wielded by generations of barbers at Potts Barber Shop. photograph by Tim Robison
“It was crowded,” Washam recalls. “I mean, back then, everybody in town went to that shop, so you had to hit it at just the right time to avoid having to wait.” And it was loud. “A lot of talk about politics,” the mayor remembers. “Local politics, national politics, all kinds of political conversations went on in there.” And a lot of opinions about different things going on in town. “Gossipy kinds of things,” Washam says. “And those men would just laugh, enjoy themselves, and have a good time in there. But it was always, as far as I can remember, good, clean conversation.”
Wilson Potts died back in 2000, but not before passing the business along to his middle son. Now, everybody in town knows and loves Mickey Potts just like they knew and loved Wilson.
• • •
On a quiet Saturday morning, Mickey relaxes in a swivel chair next to an old wooden desk in the shop’s back room. He’s wearing a smudged barber’s apron over a dark blue sweatshirt, his close-cropped hair and goatee white as chalk. At 88 years old, Mickey’s been a fixture at Potts Barber Shop since he was a 10-year-old earning extra change shining shoes while his dad cut hair.
In the main part of the shop, men sit in chairs lined up on the same linoleum floor along the same wood-paneled wall, waiting to get a trim from barber Chad Hill or from Mickey’s business partner, Mark Muldrow. Mickey soon shuffles into the front area of the shop to greet customers who’ve just walked in off the street.
Wilson Potts got his start in the ’50s, cutting hair in the city’s Brick Row building. Photography courtesy of Potts Barber Shop
Pointing to vintage photos on the walls, Mickey gives all credit for the shop’s longevity to his dad. From early on, Wilson Henry Potts was a bold and strategic businessman. Born in 1912 in an area of Cornelius that now sits under Lake Norman, he eventually moved with his family to the Black enclave of Smithville, then located just outside the town limits.
Wilson was 14 when a family friend up in Mooresville taught him how to cut hair. By 1935, he was working at the Gem Yarn Mill during the week and cutting hair on weekends. Eleven years later, he quit the mill and began barbering full-time at the Black-owned Norton Barber Shop in the Brick Row building. He was soon recruited as the first Black barber in the white-owned Blakely Barber Shop, two doors down. A Black barber working alongside white colleagues was not typical in Jim Crow-era North Carolina.
Brick Row was hopping in the early years. In addition to the two barbershops, there was a string of other businesses, including the town post office, a sandwich shop, a jewelry store, and a public shower in the basement that the barber shops’ male customers could use for 25 cents.
Today, Mickey Potts carries on the tradition at the Catawba Avenue barbershop. photograph by Tim Robison
“It was a gathering place,” Wilson told The Charlotte Observer in 1990. “We had a pool table in the back room and that really brought ’em in. We did all right in those days. There were two mills in town then and a lot of farmers. We’d be real busy on Saturdays.”
Mickey’s older brother, James, was the first Potts kid to shine shoes at the shop; he later passed the job along to Mickey and their younger brother, Ron. In 1952, Clarence Blakely retired and let Wilson run the shop. Shortly thereafter, Mickey set off for barber school in Winston-Salem, and by 1956, he was working for his dad full-time. A year later, Blakely sold the business to Wilson. And in 1960, Potts Barber Shop moved to its current spot on Catawba Avenue.
• • •
All of the patrons in the shop this morning are Black, but it wasn’t always like that. “When we started out,” Mickey says, “we were cutting white hair only. We weren’t allowed to cut Black hair. Barbershops weren’t integrated back then.” He glances out the front window, memories filling his head. “But when the movement heated up in the late ’50s and early ’60s, [Black] people started complaining about it.”
He’s talking about the civil rights movement. In 1968, students at nearby Davidson College boycotted Johnson’s Barber Shop, a Black-owned business in that town that also catered to white people only. The owner, Ralph Johnson, eventually capitulated, integrating the shop, but not without pushback from his white customers. Mickey’s father knew he’d eventually be faced with the same dilemma, but he kept doing business the way he’d always done it.
The interior of Potts Barber Shop hasn’t changed much over the past 60-some years. photograph by Tim Robison
Until one day in 1972, when Toots Burton, a young Black man who worked at The Farmer’s Company feed-and-seed store next door, walked in and said, “Hey, Potts, how about a haircut?”
The venerable barber knew that it was an act of rebellion, but he took it in stride.
“My dad, he said, ‘Have a seat,’ ” Mickey recalls with a laugh. “And Daddy cut his hair.”
Being Cornelius’s oldest Black-owned business has earned Potts Barber Shop. photograph by Tim Robison
It was as simple as that. From that day on, Potts Barber Shop has welcomed anyone who walks in the door to get a haircut, hang out with each other, chat about local issues, maybe watch a ball game on the TV. “We didn’t have any trouble at all,” Mickey says. “It really wasn’t a big deal.”
But it was a big deal in Davidson. The controversy at Johnson’s Barber Shop eventually led to the shuttering of that business. Yet here, in Cornelius, nothing changed. No one balked. No one stopped coming to Wilson Potts for their weekly trims. Washam attributes the shop’s ability to weather the storms of racial unrest to its unflinching owner. For decades, Potts had worked quietly behind the scenes for civil rights and was one of those eventually responsible for getting Smithville annexed into Cornelius. “He would just give the right advice to the right people in a very nonthreatening way,” Washam says. “And many of the politicians back in the day followed through on his suggestions — because he cut their hair. They knew him. And they respected him.”
• • •
Mickey Potts doesn’t talk much while cutting hair, but he does a whole lot of listening — just like his dad. He gestures to one of the barber chairs, and his smile becomes a grin. He’s remembering the time when a couple of customers nearly came to blows. One man was sitting in the chair next to the window. Mickey was working one of the middle chairs, cutting the other man’s hair. A discussion came up between the two guys in the chairs. “I don’t know what it was about, but it got heated,” Mickey recalls. “Well, I was trying to turn my customer this way, and the other boy was trying to turn his customer around the other way so they couldn’t see each other.”
It didn’t work. The two men just kept craning their necks to look each other in the eyes. Mickey lets out a big belly laugh. “We got through it somehow,” he says, shaking his head. “We got through it safely and without incident.”
A fixture in Potts Barber Shop since age 10, Mickey styles his clientele with expert precision. photograph by Tim Robison
As he reminisces, a few more customers walk in from the street and take seats next to the wood-paneled wall. “Let me show you something,” Mickey says, pointing to the front window that once looked out onto the Reeves Mill but now shows a modern Cornelius with rows of SUVs parked outside. “When we started out, we had a checkerboard next to that window, and we had guys stop by just to play checkers.” One man, who lived 22 miles away in Mount Holly, bought a bicycle and parked it in Cornelius; he’d catch the bus from his home, ride over, get on his bike, and just cruise around town. “And he’d always stop in Potts Barber Shop to play checkers,” Mickey says. “People’d come from all over just to be here.”
To be in a welcoming community. Among people who care about each other. Regardless of race or social status. Regardless of religious or political opinions. Maybe it was those very differences that made hanging out at Potts Barber Shop so special.
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