Thomasville

Thomasville. A Key Stop and Refuge. John W. Thomas, who represented this area in the state legislature in the mid-1800s, laid out the town of Thomasville in 1852 on the proposed route of the North Carolina Railroad. Three years later, the line was completed to the new town, and the first train passed through January 20, 1856. By 1860, Thomasville was thriving with 308 residents, a female seminary and a shoe factory. During the war, two companies, including the renowned “Thomasville Rifles” (Company B, 14th North Carolina Infantry), served in Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Many of the soldiers who boarded trains two hundred yards east of here (a memorial is located at West Main and Cramer Streets, south of the railroad) later fell in the Seven Days’ Battles and at Sharpsburg (Antietam), Gettysburg, and the Wilderness. After the war, Thomasville became noted for its furniture-making industry, especially chair manufacturing., Thomasville, a key stop on the North Carolina Railroad, played an important role during the Civil War as a refuge for wounded and ill soldiers and civilians fleeing war-torn eastern North Carolina. Local factories produced shoes for the Confederate cause, and a smallpox hospital was located here. In 1864, Gen. James Longstreet’s corps passed through on the railroad en route from Georgia to rejoin Lee’s army in Virginia. Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston established hospitals in a tobacco warehouse and in the local Baptist and Methodist churches in March 1865, as his Army of Tennessee retreated north. Local citizens assisted in the care of wounded soldiers, Northern and Southern, from the battles of Averasboro and Bentonville (March 13 and March 19-21, 1865) The Union and Confederate soldiers who died in the hospitals were interred in Thomasville City Cemetery side by side, a very rare practice during the war., (captions) , (upper left) John W. Thomas , (lower left) Corner of Main and Salem Streets, late 19th century , (lower center) Confederate dead in the Blood Lane, Antietam , Courtesy Library of Congress. These soldiers likely were members of the 14th N.C. Infantry, Co. B, the “Thomasville Rifles,” raised in Thomasville. , (lower right) Civil War-era photograph of a Thomasville shoe factory.