This roadside historic marker is located at Third Street and Tryon Street in downtown Charlotte, at the former site of the building that housed the WBT Studios from 1922 to 1955.
The marker reads as follows:
"L 114
WBT / WBTV
Oldest broadcast stations in N.C. Est. 1922, WBT radio long hosted live country music. WBTV sign-on, July 15, 1949. Studios here until 1955."
From the North Carolina historical marker website: (
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"Radio broadcasting in North Carolina originated with a series of broadcasts by North Carolina State College in the fall of 1921. Governor Cameron Morrison and Josephus Daniels appeared on the air but the license for WLAC in the electrical engineering department was for experimental, and not commercial, purposes. Due to a lack of state funding, WLAC ceased to operate in May 1923.
WBT was the first commercial radio station in North Carolina and the second in the South after Atlanta’s WSB. WFAJ in Asheville began broadcasting on May 4, 1922 but ceased to operate in 1923. Raleigh’s WPTF, still in business, originated as WFBQ in October 1924.
Broadcasting in Charlotte began with an amateur station established by enthusiasts in the kitchen of Fred Laxton in March 1921. They applied for a commercial license and began regular broadcasts on March 25, 1922, from the eighth floor of the Independence Building (demolished in 1981, it stood at the junction of Tryon and Trade Streets). The license assigning the call letters WBT arrived on April 10. In 1924 the station moved two blocks away to the Wilder Building (it was demolished in 1983 and the lot it occupied now houses the Marriott Hotel).
WBT flourished with wide sales of radios beginning in the early 1930s. Longtime chief voice of the station Grady Cole joined the staff in 1929. The signal was boosted to 50,000 watts, to blanket the East Coast, in 1933. In the 30s and 40s, WBT regularly broadcast country (or “hillbilly”) music performers. The Crazy Water Crystals Company, a laxative manufacturer in Mineral Springs, Texas, sponsored the best known broadcast, one comparable to the Grand Ole Opry on Nashville’s WSM and the National Barn Dance on WLS in Chicago.
WBT became home to the Briarhoppers and, in time, to Arthur Smith and Fred Kirby. In those years Charlotte became a recording center, with the presence of RCA Victor and Decca, among other labels. WBT changed hands several times and was owned by CBS from 1929 until 1945, when it was acquired by Jefferson Standard.
On July 15, 1949, announcer Jim Patterson signed on WBTV (Channel 3), the first television station in North Carolina, three months ahead of WFMY in Greensboro. Also Jefferson Standard owned, WFMY signed on, September 22, 1949. In 1955 WBT and WBTV studios moved to their present location.
References:
Wesley Herndon Wallace, “The Development of Broadcasting in North Carolina, 1922-1948” (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1962)
WBT website: (
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Pamela Grundy, “’We Always Tried to Be Good People’: Respectability, Crazy Water Crystals, and Hillbilly Music on the Air, 1933-1935,” Journal of American History (March 1995): 1591-1620
Charlotte Country Music Story: (
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More from Wikipedia: (
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History
Early Years
The station dates to December 1920, when Fred Laxton, Earle Gluck and Frank Bunker set up an amateur radio station in Laxton's home. Four months later, the station received an experimental license as 4XD. The trio decided to apply for a commercial license in 1922, and incorporated as the Southern Radio Corporation. On April 10, the station signed on as the first fully licensed radio station south of Washington, D.C. WSB in Atlanta was the first station in the Southeast to actually broadcast, a month before WBT. However, the Commerce Department only authorized WSB to broadcast weather reports until it received its license a few months after WBT. (Gluck was later a partner in competitor WSOC, and was the first president of WSOC-TV when it launched in 1957.)
In 1925, the original owners sold WBT to Charlotte Buick car dealer C.C. Coddington, who promoted both the radio station and his auto dealership with the slogan "Watch Buicks Travel." Coddington built a transmitter at a farm property he owned on Nations Ford Road in south Charlotte, where it remains today. He sold WBT to the two-year-old CBS Radio Network in 1929. CBS wanted to make its Chicago station WBBM full-time on 780 AM, which was a shared frequency with KFAB in Omaha. In order to do that they moved KFAB to 1110 AM. That was accomplished by directionalizing the signal of WBT. A series of power increases brought WBT to its current 50,000 watts with the 50,000 watt transmitter being dedicated August 12, 1932.
In July 1947, a satellite station, five miles northeast of Shelby, North Carolina, was authorized "for benefit of nighttime listeners west of Charlotte."
New Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations forced CBS to sell WBT when the network reached the maximum number of stations it could own. In 1945, it was acquired by the Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company, forerunner of Jefferson-Pilot, though it remained a CBS affiliate. In 1947, an FM sister station at 99.9 MHz was put on the air.[10] But that WBT-FM was discontinued in the mid-1950s and is not same as today's WBT-FM 99.3, which first went on the air in 1969 as WCMJ, owned by the York-Clover Broadcasting Company.[11] In 1949, Jefferson Standard signed on Charlotte's first television station, WBTV Channel 3."