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 of 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 later fell in the Seven Days’ Battles and at Sharpsburg, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness. After the war, Thomasville became noted for its furniture-making industry, especially chair manufacturing. As a key stop on the North Carolina Railroad, Thomasville 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 on March 13 and March 19-21, 1865. 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.