Historic Sites in Thomas County

The history of Thomas County

Thomas County was created in 1825 from parts of Irwin and Decatur counties and named for Jett Thomas, a hero of the War of 1812. Its seat is Thomasville. Native Americans hunted and farmed this region before white settlers converted it into plantations, where cotton was the leading crop, supplemented by tobacco, rice, peaches and pears. Pebble Hill Plantation, established by Thomas Jefferson Johnson in 1825, has been a museum since 1983. The railroad reached the county in 1861. In December 1864, as Sherman's army moved through Georgia, Confederate officials transferred about 5,000 Union prisoners from Andersonville to a temporary stockade at Thomasville; a deep trench dug by enslaved African Americans still marks the site. After the war, rail connections made Thomasville a fashionable winter retreat for wealthy Northerners, who built more than fifty grand Victorian cottages. One of them, the Lapham-Patterson House, built in 1884 and 1885 for a Chicago shoe merchant, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1975 and is now a state historic site. The resort trade faded in the early 1900s, but many of the area's historic plantations survive as quail-hunting estates, museums or inns. Downtown stands the Big Oak, a live oak more than 315 years old with a limb span of 162 feet.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orgnps.govgastateparks.org