DAVIDSON COUNTY’S HISTORY: FROM TRADING FORD TO BARBECUE AND THE BIG CHAIR

THE COURTHOUSE THAT BECAME A LANDMARK

By the 1850s, Davidson County had outgrown its first courthouse.

County leaders commissioned a much larger building, completed in 1858 on Lexington’s public square.

The structure featured Corinthian columns, arched windows and elaborate architectural details. One contemporary admirer called it a “Temple of Justice.”

That courthouse is still standing.

Its survival was hardly guaranteed.

In 1865, near the end of the Civil War, the building’s interior burned under what state historians describe as suspicious circumstances. Local residents later blamed occupying Union troops, although the precise cause has never been firmly established.

The exterior walls and columns survived, some records were saved, and the courthouse was eventually repaired.

It continued serving Davidson County until a larger courthouse was completed in 1958.

Today the old courthouse is one of the most recognizable buildings in Lexington and is home to the Davidson County Historical Museum.

Few buildings in the county have witnessed more history.

FARMING, SLAVERY AND ANTEBELLUM DAVIDSON COUNTY

Before factories transformed Lexington and Thomasville, Davidson County was overwhelmingly agricultural.

Families produced corn, wheat and other crops, raised livestock and operated mills along local waterways.

Slavery was also part of that economy and cannot be separated from an honest account of the county’s early development.

According to research compiled by the Davidson County Historical Museum, enslaved people made up approximately 20 percent of the county’s population in 1850.

The 1860 census recorded 3,076 enslaved people in Davidson County and 429 slaveholding heads of household.

Most farms did not hold enslaved people. Among those that did, holdings of between one and five people were the most common.

Local records document enslaved people being sold as part of estates, privately transferred as property and hired out for labor. Museum research also documents sales and the rental of enslaved labor at Davidson County’s courthouses.

Those records often reduced human beings to financial entries.

But the people behind those entries helped clear land, grow crops, build structures, perform skilled and domestic labor and raise families here.

Emancipation after the Civil War ended legal slavery, but it did not immediately produce equal political, economic or educational opportunity.

That would become another long chapter in Davidson County history.

THE RAILROAD CREATES A NEW KIND OF COUNTY

The next major transformation arrived on steel rails.

The North Carolina Railroad pushed through the Piedmont during the 1850s, connecting communities to larger markets and changing where businesses could succeed.

Few Davidson County communities were shaped more directly by the railroad than Thomasville.

Businessman and legislator John W. Thomas championed the North Carolina Railroad and helped bring the line through the area where a community developed around the depot.

The state historical marker honoring Thomas calls him the founder of Thomasville and notes that, as a legislator, he led the fight for the railroad.

Thomasville was incorporated in 1857.

What began as a railroad community would soon become something much bigger.

YADKIN COLLEGE: DAVIDSON COUNTY’S FORGOTTEN COLLEGE TOWN

Davidson County once had its own college.

Yadkin Institute opened in October 1856 near the Yadkin River as a Methodist Protestant school for young men.

The General Assembly rechartered it as Yadkin College in 1861, just as the Civil War began.

The war quickly interrupted operations. Nearly all of the school’s students reportedly enlisted in Confederate service, and classes stopped.

The school reopened in 1867, later returned to collegiate instruction and admitted women beginning in 1878.

In 1883, lawmakers changed its name again, this time to Yadkin Collegiate Institute.

The institution finally closed in 1924 as public education expanded and enrollment declined.

The college disappeared.

The name did not.

The community of Yadkin College still carries it today.

THE CIVIL WAR REACHES DAVIDSON COUNTY

Davidson County was not the site of one of the Civil War’s major battles, but the war affected virtually every part of local life.

Men left for military service.

Families dealt with shortages and death.

Enslaved people experienced the upheaval that eventually brought emancipation.

And in the final days of the Confederacy, one of the most recognizable figures in the collapsing Confederate government passed directly through Davidson County.

After Richmond fell and General Robert E. Lee surrendered, Confederate President Jefferson Davis fled south with members of his cabinet.

On the night of April 16, 1865, Davis and his party camped in a pine grove east of Lexington before continuing south.

History did not always happen somewhere else.

Sometimes it stopped for the night outside Lexington.

FROM FARMS TO FACTORIES

After the Civil War, Davidson County gradually developed into one of the Piedmont’s important manufacturing areas.

Rail transportation gave Lexington and Thomasville access to raw materials and distant markets.

Cotton mills, textile operations, furniture factories and related businesses grew.

In Lexington, one of the most important developments came in 1914, when Erlanger Mills began production.

New York textile businessmen Abraham and Charles Erlanger purchased about 250 acres north of town and developed not simply a factory, but an entire mill village.

By the 1920s, the Erlanger community included hundreds of houses along with churches, schools, a hotel, hospital, clubhouse, company store and other facilities.

For generations of local families, industrial work became as much a part of Davidson County life as farming had been for earlier generations.

THOMASVILLE BECOMES CHAIR CITY

Thomasville’s signature industry was furniture.

The Thomasville Chair Company, established in 1904 and later known as Thomasville Furniture, became an enormous operation. State museum records say the company was producing as many as 500 chairs per day by 1905.

The furniture industry became so important to the city’s identity that Thomasville decided to advertise it with something nobody could possibly overlook.

A gigantic chair.

The first Big Chair was erected in September 1922.

It stood 16 feet, 6 inches tall and was made by Thomasville Furniture Company. Exposure to the weather eventually took its toll, and the wooden chair was removed in 1936.

Thomasville later decided to bring the landmark back.

On January 9, 1951, the cornerstone was laid for the chair that stands downtown today.

Built with a steel framework, wire mesh, cement and granite material designed to resemble wood, the monument stands about 30 feet tall.

It became exactly what its builders intended:

Impossible to miss.

BLACK SCHOOLS BECOME CENTERS OF COMMUNITY

The end of slavery did not end segregation.

For decades, Black Davidson County residents attended separate schools and built churches, civic organizations, businesses and neighborhoods within a system that denied equal access to many public institutions.

Two surviving school buildings help tell that story.

In Thomasville, Church Street School was constructed between 1935 and 1937 as the city’s first brick school facility for African American students.

When the school opened in 1937, it enrolled 515 students, with E. L. Peterson serving as its first principal.

Church Street School became much more than a classroom building. National Register research describes it as a community meeting place as well as a school. It continued serving Thomasville’s Black community until the city school system integrated in 1968.

Lexington had its own important institution.

Dunbar School was built in 1951 as a high school for Lexington’s Black community. The school remains a landmark and has become the focus of preservation and redevelopment efforts.

These buildings are reminders that educational history is not simply about school systems.

It is also about the communities that formed around the schools.