Elizabeth is unique.  It's the only neighborhood in Charlotte named for a woman, Elizabeth Watts, whose husband, Gerard Snowden Watts, had made a lot of money in the tobacco business in Durham, NC.  Her son-in-law, Charles B. King, selected Charlotte as the location for a small Lutheran college for women that opened in 1897. Because Mr. Watts provided most of the funding, President Kings named it Elizabeth College in honor of his mother-in-law.

The Elizabeth neighborhood, named for the college, became one of the most fashionable areas in Charlotte. Such important community leaders as William Henry Belk, founder of the Belk Department Stores, lived there. Most of the earliest houses were built on Elizabeth Avenue and the streets that crossed it, like Travis Avenue and Torrence Street. The pace of development quickened after December 1902, when the Charlotte Consolidated Construction Company completed a trolley line that ran from McDowell Street to Elizabeth College.

J.A. Dempwolf, an architect from York, PA, designed the buildings. The campus was on the block where Presbyterian Hospital now stands. Elizabeth College remained in Charlotte until 1915, when it moved to Salem, VA. The main building of Elizabeth College was demolished in 1980.