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Charlotte
A banking hub on the Carolina Piedmont
Charlotte sits on the rolling red-clay Piedmont of southern North Carolina, near the South Carolina line, on a low gap in the hills that early trading paths crossed. It grew from a colonial crossroads — and a brief gold-mining boom in the early 1800s, the first U.S. gold rush — into the second-largest banking center in the country after New York, an unusual concentration of finance for an inland Southern city.
The surrounding Piedmont is gently rolling wooded country between the Blue Ridge to the west and the coastal plain to the east, with no major river or port to explain the city's rise — Charlotte, like Atlanta, is a creature of railroads, roads, and commerce. Booming with Sun Belt growth, it anchors a metro of nearly three million.