THE QUAINT OF HEART: HUNTERSVILLE IS A SUBURBAN CHARLOTTE BOOMTOWN THAT HAS CARVED ITS OWN IDENTITY.

• Author: Mims, Bryan

The place is an anachronism, a relic, a zoning-ordinance oversight. And it's a marvel. Quaint things shine through the hubbub of Huntersville brighter than a digital billboard. When driving west on Gilead Road on a weekday afternoon, traffic is clotted by commuters and people bound for a latte or a hot yoga session.

Go past Novant Health Huntersville Medical Center, rising fortress-like along Interstate 77, a dozen miles north of downtown Charlotte. Pass a Latin American restaurant named Verde, a pole-dance fitness studio, a bagel shop, a hair-removal salon, and the usual suspects of 21st-century suburbia. Just as Gilead Road curves and narrows to a packed two-lane, there it is: A yard cluttered with oddball contraptions "made out of everybody's junk," as the property's owner, Benny Reeder, puts it. A sign reading "Benny's Yard Art and Welding" suggests a kitschy roadside attraction.

There's a teepee built of slabs from a sawmill, a car with a body of propane tanks, stick-figure people with an anatomy of steel pipes, and critters with hubcap faces. Reeder, a 69-year-old man of few words and a Southern drawl, moved to this spot in 1972. Back then, Huntersville wasn't much. "Wasn't nothing to it, just a two-lane road," he says. When he looks out at the traffic and all the subdivisions, there's a sigh of exasperation. "Well, it ain't like it used to be. Too many people," he says. But given the offbeat and possibly off-putting nature of his trade, he knows he's here to stay. "It'd be hard for me to go somewhere else and do what I'm doing now. I've been down here so long, I've been grandfathered in."

Huntersville was incorporated in 1873 along a major north-south rail line and named for Robert Boston Hunter, a local cotton farmer. Well into the mid-20th century, Huntersville stayed a small, textile-mill town framed by farmland, still a comfortable distance from Charlotte.

When Reeder moved here in 1972, Huntersville had a population of about 1,500. Through the 1970s, the town shed residents, shrinking 16% to 1,294 by 1980. Charlotte's emergence as a big-league banking center and cosmopolitan city changed everything. Huntersville's population rose to nearly 25,000 residents in the year 2000 and kept on growing. The local chamber estimates 65,000 residents. Huntersville is North Carolina's 17th-largest city. Among the state's 20 biggest cities, only Cary and Apex have grown faster over the last eight years.

More than a bedroom community

"The...