Thomasville: The Chair City
Near Winston Salem, North Carolina
In eighteen fifty-two, state legislator John W. Thomas laid out a town on the proposed route of the North Carolina Railroad and modestly named it after himself. Thomasville grew quietly as a market town until nineteen oh four, when a local entrepreneur launched the Thomasville Chair Company with a single product.
The chair caught on, other mills followed, and by the mid-twentieth century Thomasville was calling itself the Chair City of the World, turning out more chairs per capita than anywhere else in the country. To make the nickname official, the city erected a thirty-foot concrete replica of a Duncan Phyfe armchair in the center of town in nineteen fifty-one. It is still there, still the tallest chair most drivers on this stretch of the Piedmont will ever see.
